Lord’s supremo Colin Graves so proud of Yorkshire CCC legacy

The England and Wales Cricket Board chairman helped to create the magnificent arena that exists today in his capacity as the former Yorkshire County Cricket Club supremo.

Graves, the multi-millionaire founder of Costcutter, rescued Yorkshire from financial disaster in 2002, helped them buy the ground from landlords Leeds Rugby in 2005 and dragged them kicking and screaming into the 21st century.

Now, five years after leaving Yorkshire for the bright lights of Lord’s, Graves is a proud man as he reflects on the strides taken at Headingley in the past two decades, work expertly continued by current chief executive Mark Arthur and his talented staff.

“Headingley has caught up with other grounds in England for standard, quality, facilities, viewer experiences, all those kinds of things,” Graves told The Yorkshire Post.

“Headingley’s caught up and is now recognised as one of the best around.

“The new stand (opened last year) is brilliant, and it’s finished the ground off beautifully.

“Mark Arthur is a real good guy, and Yorkshire have got the right people doing the right jobs.”

Flashback to 2002 and Graves, whose tenure at Lord’s finishes this year, inherited one of most aesthetically displeasing venues in the land.

The old football stand looked as if it had been parachuted in from Torquay United, or some such outpost, while one had the feeling that the whole shebang had been put together by a hyperactive youngster with a few spare Lego bricks.

“When you look back at Headingley in 2002, it was on its knees and the whole place was not a pretty picture by far,” said Graves.

“We didn’t have a proper pavilion, and it was a hotchpotch of a ground; there was no plan to pull things together and develop it as a proper cricket stadium.

“It was a mess from a development point of view, and from a ground point of view, and when you looked around at the other grounds, Headingley was pretty much bottom of the list.

“Then the others invested megabucks – Edgbaston and Old Trafford, for example, to really get those grounds up to scratch – and Headingley got left even further behind.”

With Graves as chief executive, Geoff Cope as chairman, Brian Bouttell as finance director and Robin Smith as president, aka the ‘Gang of Four’, Yorkshire – and Headingley – rose from the ashes.

Graves injected cash and considerable business acumen and, unusually for someone in his position, sought neither publicity for it nor outright ownership.

Graves oversaw the construction of the East Stand, the North-East Stand and the Carnegie Pavilion, and he envisioned the joint main stand opened last summer – one of the finest at any ground in the world.

“What we’ve got now is virtually what we drew out on the back of a fag packet to be honest to start off with,” said Graves.

“It was a plan put together in 2002 by Copey and me and Robin Smith and Brian Bouttell to virtually say this is what we’d like to see in years ahead – and it was looking years ahead because we knew we couldn’t do it overnight.

“It was a plan to really catch up with the rest of the grounds who had spent megabucks in their developments.

“The key, of course, was buying the ground – because if we hadn’t bought the ground we couldn’t have done anything – and we developed it and made it into what is now a super ground.”

As ECB chairman, Graves is naturally interested in the welfare of all the nation’s grounds, which have undergone significant transformation in recent times.

But it would be a strange Yorkshireman who did not have a soft spot for a Headingley venue which, had it not been for Graves’s intervention back in the day, might well have ceased to host international cricket.

“In 2002, when we took over, the ‘Gang of Four’, everybody said, ‘Headingley’s bankrupt. You’ll never sort it out. Write it off. It’s a waste of time. We should move somewhere else’,” added Graves.

“All those sort of things were kicked around for 18 months to two years, and everybody was doom and gloom about what Headingley is and what it never will be, and you look at it now and you think, ‘Yeah, it’s something special’.”

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