The row surrounding Geoffrey Boycott’s attempt to gain election to Yorkshire’s board escalated yesterday when Michael Vaughan asked Boycott to “back down” from his stance.
Vaughan is offering his support to the club management, led by Steve Denison, the chairman, who has asked members to oppose Boycott’s bid to be re-elected to a board he last served on from 2007-2012.
Denison has said that Yorkshire have “moved on” from Boycott, claiming that his re-election would jeopardise the stability the club have enjoyed in recent years, winning the County Championship in the past two seasons.
Boycott has said that he wishes to stand to give a stronger voice to the interests of members and to prioritise reducing debts that have risen to more than £20 million, which he has said are “killing the club”, in spite of their recent success on the field.
Vaughan, though, publicly threw his weight behind Denison yesterday, believing that such matters should be dealt with by board members with financial expertise. “Come on @GeoffreyBoycott, back down,” Vaughan tweeted. “Let the experts on finance deal with it. Not cricket experts.”
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Boycott responded to Vaughan’s comments in today’s Yorkshire Post: “Michael Vaughan is a colleague of mine. I work with him for BBC and Channel Five, and I get on very well with him. If he wants to talk to me about anything, he has my personal numbers and email, both in South Africa and in England. He can talk to me any time he wants.
“I don’t understand why there is all this negativity. What are they afraid of? What do they think I’m going to do, commit murder? It should just be a nice, straightforward election by the members - quiet, dignified, and let the members decide. I had absolutely no idea that the chairman was going to issue statements and send out stuff to the members like that, but maybe I was naive.”
Boycott has insisted that he does not want to cause trouble or interfere in cricketing matters, merely that he would like a say in the matters of a club who remain close to his heart.
“I’m only standing because there are vacancies on the board and because I care about the club,” he said. “The cricket is going great, but while we’re basking in the success of the cricket, we’re racking up so much debt that, if we’re not careful, we might not be in existence further down the line. It’s no good having a good cricket team and the club going down the tube.”
The dispute between two former England captains and Yorkshire opening batsmen carries uncomfortable echoes of another era, when Boycott was a highly divisive figure towards the end of his playing career in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
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He was president of the club in 2012 and 2013 and has been offered a role by the club as a global ambassador, which he has turned down. But Denison has written to members before the annual general meeting on March 26, urging them not to support Boycott in the postal ballot.
Boycott’s supporters have claimed that Yorkshire were acting unlawfully by standing in Boycott’s way, but the club responded yesterday with a statement confirming that their actions had complied with the rules for election to the board.
Denison has expressed his opinion that, at a delicate time in the club’s financial recovery from near-bankruptcy, the board required financial rather than cricketing expertise. Earlier this week, the club announced a profit of £368,000, their first since 2009.