Pakistan Test match snub sees Yorkshire lose £1m

The club lost nearly £2m in 2010 on top of existing debts of £19.7m.

Those outstanding debts include £8.5m owed to Leeds City Council for ground renovations, which involved the construction of the £21m Carnegie Pavillion.

The rest is made up of finances owed to the bank and other loan note holders – all of which the club forecast will be paid off by 2019, at the end of their current staging agreement with the England and Wales Cricket Board.

That deal ensures Test matches will be played at Headingley Carnegie every year from 2012 to 2019.

But it was the Test match held at Headingley in July 2010, between Pakistan and Australia, that has so adversely affected their finances.

Chairman and chief executive Colin Graves, who along with the rest of the board opted to forfeit England’s Test match with Bangladesh in favour of what they anticipated would be a more lucrative Pakistan versus Australia contest, said: “It’s disappointing. After four successful years we’ve had a year where we’ve virtually gone backwards, and it’s down to one thing – the Australia-Pakistan Test match.

“We didn’t sell enough tickets and that hit us to the tune of £1m, simple as that. In hindsight, we wouldn’t have done it. We all thought it was the right thing to do, everyone in cricket said it was the right thing to do, and it backfired.

“The Asian community basically didn’t get behind it, which amazed me. From all the meetings we had with people they were going to get behind it and support it, but on the actual days nobody turned up. We sold 6,000 tickets per day for the first three days – unbelievable. We’ve never ever done that in the history of Yorkshire.

“If you look at the accounts the rest are fine, it’s just that Test match. The rest of the year all fell into line – the sponsorship, the county matches, no problem at all.”

On top of existing debts, Yorkshire lost a further £1,859,009 in 2010, nearly a million pound of which is interest charges, with depreciation, tax and turnover, accounting for the rest.

Yorkshire made £5,580,728 in 2010 but spent £5,912,373.

They anticipate a reduction in deficit in 2011, including an £800,000 swing in turnover that should help them towards an even budgetary footing in 2012.

“We have cut our cloth accordingly,” said Graves, who is to continue for the foreseeable future in the dual role of chief executive and chairman with no money in the budget to hire a designated CEO to replace Stewart Regan, who left the club to run the Scottish Football Association last September.

“We’ve made some redundancies but there’ll be no more. It’s going to be a tough year and we have to get through it together.

“We’re going to make a slight loss in 2011, £250,000 before depreciation at the most (£1.08m after depreciation), and with a bit of fair wind that might be a little less.

“We’ve already sold 10,000 tickets for the ODI with Sri Lanka (July 1) so those figures are looking good. All the hospitality is going fantastically well, there’s a lot of good things on the horizon. In 2012 we’ve got South Africa as a Test match and West Indies as a one-dayer so I’m pretty sure we’ll fill the stadium with ease.

“It’s just we could have done without 2010.”

The financial situation is in stark contrast to Yorkshire’s fortunes on the field.

In 2010, Andrew Gale’s young charges made significant strides. Perennial relegation strugglers, they transformed their fortunes and came within a solid final day’s cricket of winning the County Championship title and also reached the semi-finals of the CB40 one-day competition.

They have lost Jacques Rudolph from their line-up for this year – the South African Kolpak player leaving a significant hole in their top-order batting – and brought in former England international bowler Ryan Sidebottom.

The impact made by Tim Bresnan and Ajmal Shahzad on the England set-up has been considerable, while Gale, Adam Lyth, Jonny Bairstow and Adil Rashid are all on the cusp of following them into the national selectors’ thinking.

However, director of professional cricket Martyn Moxon is without an overseas player for 2011 and with the current financial predicament, that is unlikely to change.

Graves continued: “We don’t need any more players. Provided we don’t get massive injuries or lots of call-ups to England, we’re happy with what we’ve got.

“If you look at the overseas players we had last year (Ryan Harris, Tino Best) they didn’t do much for us, so we effectively didn’t have one last year.”

Despite the financial plight, Graves is asking for understanding and support from the Yorkshire membership. And he is also open to outside investment, though the club are not launching a direct appeal for an external saviour.

He said: “We do need some support cash wise from our members, we need to keep them happy and keep them on board, but at the end of the day we need them to get behind the club.

“And we’re always open to outside investment. If people want to loan us money we’ll talk to them.

“The interest charge we’ve got at the moment is approaching £1m. We’ve got to try and reduce that as quickly as we can.”