Stephen Vaughan exclusive Pt 2: Why I took on the challenge of leading Yorkshire CCC

One half-expected to see it hanging on the office wall of Stephen Vaughan, the new Yorkshire chief executive, who has taken on a challenge that speaks for itself.

“I had lots of people say to me, ‘You’re crazy! What are you doing?’ laughs Vaughan, who arrived at Headingley last month after three years as group chief executive at Wasps.

“I was offered roles in other sports, and people said, ‘Why don’t you do X, Y, Z and have an easy life?

“But I had my eyes wide open coming to Yorkshire, and I haven’t been shocked or surprised by anything; I must have asked 1,000 questions before taking the job.

“What I see is a club with great potential, with some great people working for it, and I’d much rather be somewhere where people really care and are bothered about the game and are passionate about it. I’d much rather be in Yorkshire than anywhere else.”

Vaughan, 48, is not from these parts - he has a strong West Midlands accent and the family home is presently in Worcestershire.

He mentions in passing that he could have earned twice as much, for example, as the CEO of a funeral directors (is there any difference, one might quip?) and that an easier career move might have been made.

But, joking aside, the first thing that strikes you - along with the Black Country accent that rattles out thoughts and ideas almost faster than a journalist can record them - is his passion for the job and the fact that he cares.

The proof of the pudding is always in the eating, but a club which has been in defensive mode for the past 12 months, sometimes mystifyingly so, feels ready to open up again under this ebullient figure, a man good enough to play football for Walsall in the early 1990s before embarking on a career that took him into the travel industry (where he led Thomas Cook’s involvement with the 2012 Olympics) and then into rugby, where he had seven years as managing director of Gloucester Rugby before moving to Wasps.

“At the moment, I’m still in listening mode,” says Vaughan, “finding out what the temperature of the organisation is. I’ve met numerous people in the short time I’ve been here and I’m finding out what their thoughts and perceptions are and looking for patterns; I’m gathering information all the time.

“Everybody has got their own thoughts (on what has happened at Yorkshire), and I think naturally there’s some residual elements that have come up from the last year or so in terms of staff having had to deal with some very difficult situations, that sort of thing. There’s a lot to do, but I hope there’s a fresh optimism having a new CEO in who hasn’t been here, is sympathetic to it but probably not tarnished by it, and I’d like to think that we can move on now to a new and fresh view of what Yorkshire is about, essentially to make this club the best it can be.”

It would be disingenuous to say that all has been sweetness and light behind the scenes since the well-documented events that brought down the club in its previous incarnation and which has seen a whole new organisation, almost, spring up from those ashes.

Although Yorkshire is a big club with a big fan base, it is also a comparatively small operation in terms of personnel and there has been great pressure on the hard-working staff who, in some cases, have had to manage what, for them, must still feel like a barely credible transition from one incarnation to the next.

Vaughan will already have been told 10 different things by 10 different people, then another 10 different things by another 10 different people, and so on.

He is necessarily sensitive to the past while at the same time focused on the present and the future; it is a difficult balancing act which, in part, explains why he needs time and understanding to make his mark, particularly with the club not yet over the brow of a horrible hill which is set to continue with further parliamentary scrutiny and then the England and Wales Cricket Board hearings. “We want to move forward, but saying that we’re going to move forward and that everything’s great and we don’t need to think or talk about any of that stuff anymore would be wrong and I think it would be blinkered,” says Vaughan.

“Clearly there’s been a lot that’s gone on and it’s still ongoing, and we’ve learnt a lot from what’s gone on and we believe that we have very good governance because of what this club has been through.

“A lot of credit needs to be given to the staff here because I’m very cognisant of the fact that it’s easy for me to come in with a fresh pair of eyes and start poking around and saying that everything’s wrong. Not everything is wrong: there were just certain things from which we couldn’t move on without fresh pairs of eyes and a new way of doing things.”

If Vaughan, an Aston Villa fan who once played a youth cup match against some of Manchester United’s ‘Class of ‘92’, does have a saying, it is not “you don’t have to be mad to work here but it helps”, but rather, “what do you want to be famous for?”

“My team hear it from me every day,” he says, “and at the moment I don’t think that Yorkshire cricket is famous for the things that I want it to be famous for.

“We have to remember what’s happened here, but we can’t be famous for it forever. I want us to be talked about by our stakeholders, sponsors, partners, players, the ECB, and so on, for all the right reasons.

“When people come to Headingley, I want them to say that it’s the most professional, the most friendly, the most fun, that it’s better than Lancashire, that it’s better than Warwickshire, that it’s better than Surrey, and I make no apologies for that.

“I am competitive by nature, and I’m absolutely salivating at the thought of getting this county back to where it should be because we’ve got so much going for ourselves.”

Vaughan continues: “We cannot be famous just for one thing - we’ve got to crack on and be a good club.

“If I asked 100 people in the street now what’s the first thing that comes to mind about Yorkshire cricket, it probably wouldn’t be something to do with cricket.

“What do I want us to be famous for? I want people’s instant recall to be, especially in this area, about the cricket, a successful team, both men’s and women’s, a successful continuation of the pathway and academy, and I want us to deliver the best Ashes in the country next year.

“I want us to be commercially sustainable, financially sustainable, you name it. I want us to be the absolute best.”