“I’ve been fascinated by your five-year plan for the last fifteen years”
– Melvyn Douglas to Greta Garbo, Ninotchka (1939)
It seems only yesterday that the ECB drafted their last sweeping visionary plan for the overhaul of English cricket. (And we all have such fond memories of “Raising the Standard”.) With as much regularity as Olympic Games, general elections and Star Wars sequels, and even less eagerly awaited than the next Harry Potter Encyclopedia, this week we saw the publication of “Building Partnerships” – the ECB’s strategic plan for 2005-2009.
It’s all there in details on the ECB’s Building Partnerships section of their website. The strategic plan is their in HTML format or as a PDF (2.2 Megs), and there is video and audio from the launch which I am yet to trowel through properly. I am impressed with the references to “England captains Michael Vaughan and Clare Connor” on an equal footing.
Among the many objectives of “Building Partnerships”, I find the following most intriguing:
Developing heroes – three England cricket ‘superstars’ known by ten per cent of population by 2009
So how are they performing at the moment? Andrew Flintoff is known by how many English citizens? And do you class Wheelie Bin Giles or Minties Trescothick as “superstars”?
Analysis from Mike Selvey (The Guardian), Paul Hayward (The Telegraph) and Christopher Martin-Jenkins (The Times). And, indeed, the Corridor of Uncertainty.