Stewart Regan

The news of Chris Adams decision to remain on the south coast stunned Yorkshire fans yesterday. For Yorkshire chief executive Stewart Regan the news has left him in a state of shock. On a day where he would probably have preferred to stay in bed he kindly spoke to us instead.

 

I started by asking Stewart if he’d seen Geoffrey Boycott's unreserved condemnation of Chris Adams in the Daily Telegraph (see Boycott Slams Adams).

 

No I’ve not seen that yet although when I spoke to Geoffrey earlier he mentioned he was going to write something. You can take a hard line and Geoffrey tends to call a spade a spade, but I’m pleased in many ways Chris Adams has told me now. If we’d started at the beginning of the season and said I can’t do this, it’s not what I want or I don’t want to play for Yorkshire (which is what he told me last night) I would have been even more gutted than I am now. At least we’ve got a few months to get our act together and try and get the right people to come in.

 

If it had happened next April it would have been a disaster.

 

It would, and there’s now a bit of time to readjust our thinking. The problem is of course most of the players you would ideally want are now nailed on somewhere else. That’s why we’ve got to act quickly and identify a solution - probably two people rather than one.

 

Initially Chris was targeted as a captain but after we’d met him and heard his ambitions and aspirations we felt he could do a bigger job. We knew we wanted to split the director and coach into two because it just wasn’t working as it was and we felt Chris could provide a bridge between player and management and move into the role in a more formal capacity when he finished his playing career.

 

I think now we are going to have to concentrate on a separate captain and a head of professional cricket.

 

Yorkshire fans get used to the madness and mayhem that is the cricket club, but most supporters believe that you and your colleagues are moving the club in the right direction.

 

It just feels like a giant game of snakes and ladders at times. You move forward and make massive progress, you get a break where you think this is exactly what we want and all of the pieces come together. Then you move along a couple of days and you’re down the ladder and you’re halfway back to where you’ve come from.

 

What reason did Chris Adams give you for his change of mind?

 

 I think the penny dropped, coming to Headingley and looking around, of what was required here. Younis Khan wasn’t going to be here at the start of the season, Lehmann had gone, Lumb had gone, there was a question mark over McGrath and I think he felt he was carrying the responsibility for making runs as well as being captain, coach and everything else that we wanted him to do.

 

That’s not something that he didn’t already know was it?

 

Well it wasn’t new, that’s why I think there’s more to it than that if I’m honest. You don’t come into a meeting with the squad of players and put your mobile phone on the bottom of a flip-chart and then twelve hours later say that you are not coming. Something’s happened in the drive back to Brighton and I personally think that he may be had a better offer. They’ve come back with a drop dead offer and he’s been turned on by it.

 

Some people have suggested that Adams didn’t like the players he saw at that meeting and others have suggested Sussex must have had a role to play. If they offered Adams a lucrative managerial future there…

 

Only time will tell on that one. Sussex are not going to tell me what they’ve offered him. He went back to Brighton yesterday morning saying he had business to attend to. It doesn’t surprise me that Sussex have got him back. He’s obviously been thinking about it. If he was in two minds, whether it was family reasons, the size of the job, his daughter’s unwillingness to move schools and leave her friends. There are all sorts of things that have been mentioned but all I can comment on is what he actually told me which was that it was too much too soon.

 

In the interviews he gave he talks about how much he was looking forward being at Yorkshire. He talked about looking forward to the future and that it’s a big job but that’s why he was coming here. So all of the things he’s given as a reason for not coming are the same things he gave as his reason for coming in the first place. It’s very disappointing.

 

Are there any legal implications of Chris Adam’s u-turn?

 

With him being under contract at Sussex they still held his registration. You’re not allowed to be registered with two clubs at once so until we’d got his registration back and it was all confirmed that he was released and he’d signed all of that paperwork with Sussex we didn’t actually complete any long-form agreement and he wouldn’t sign one until his registration had been sorted out.

 

In cricket, and a lot of other sports as well, a lot is done on exchange of letters subject to a final agreement. We had confirmed the offer in writing to Chris, he accepted that and we were waiting for the final paperwork for his registration to be cleared with the ECB and then it would have gone on a long formal Professional Cricketers Association contract.

 

I suppose when you’ve seen him standing in a Yorkshire shirt in front of the cameras you must think you’ve got your man.

 

It made me smile the comment he made at the press conference that he would have played for Yorkshire for a lot less money than he was on at Sussex, when he went from Derbyshire to Sussex last time round.

 

On the message boards last night I could only find one Sussex fan who was saying that Adams had let them down, that he was a turncoat and how could Sussex take him back because he’d said quite a lot about them while he’d been away.

 

He has yes.

 

One of the popular ideas for the person to fill Adams role is Darren Lehmann. Is he someone you might consider?

 

Darren has made a commitment to two jobs, one with the South Australian government and one for XXXX lager and he had said that the only availability he would have would be in the middle of the season and he would be interested in coming back on an emergency basis. That was before he hit his 339 and in the last conversation I had with Darren he said ‘that’s how I would want to be remembered’ going out with the second highest ever innings, which wasn’t a bad way to bow out. I can’t see him coming back to play a bit part. Darren’s a guy who’s had probably the best exit that any cricketer could imagine and I don’t think he’s a realistic option to be honest.

 

Will you be considering existing players for the captaincy or will you continue to look elsewhere?

 

I think we’ll consider all options really. What we’ve got to do is plan early enough to get the right person to do the job and we’ve got a number of options. There are obviously names that have been banded around inside the club – McGrath’s name has obviously been linked with it and has been for sometime.

 

It’s a potential way of keeping him happy isn’t it?

 

It could be. We’re having a conversation with Anthony later today and see what his view is on all of this and see what it means for his decision and then we’ll also look at other options. There are overseas options now because we haven’t finalised the second overseas position yet. There’s the Kolpak route which I don’t particularly want to go down. And then there’s the other player option which is a case of availability and the cost of getting someone out of a lengthy contract.

  

You have Younis Khan who elected himself as captain earlier?

 

Yeah (laughs). The problem is the start of the season. The main reason why Younis Khan wasn’t a serious contender for captain, albeit it was considered, was the fact that he was away for the start of the season. He misses the first three Championship games because of the World Cup which would have meant we would have been without a captain. You need a captain in your pre-season preparation so the whole team building, motivation and team spirit thing can build.

 

We always get together as a team so the players, captain, manager and coach can go through the strategy of how we are going to play, what’s going to be different and how we can improve performance and we would miss all of that if Younis Khan was going to be captain. I don’t think that’s a viable option. He can still pass on his ideas when he does join the side and he’ll be a big personality in the dressing room and a good role model for players as well.

 

So will the second overseas player be Jason Gillespie?

 

Jason is still in the running but we need to sort out the captain now so the priority is shifting for the next day or so. We recognise we are now a batsman and a bowler short so we need to look at all options.

 

There must be some money in the pot with Younis Khan being funded elsewhere and presumably Chris Adams would have been offered a decent salary which now isn’t going to need paying?

 

Yeah, that’s not an issue. We will pay for the right individual that’s not in question, but we’ve got to get the right people first of all.

 

Will it be hard to sell someone Yorkshire?

 

I don’t think it’s hard to sell Yorkshire, I think it’s hard given where we are in the cycle. We’re two months behind where we should have been and most of the players that we would want are already signed up elsewhere.

 

It must be frustrating for you because you obviously felt you were on the right track…

 

(laughs) Immensely.

 

But the press and media that this Chris Adams situation brings makes Yorkshire look silly when it’s not really your fault.

 

I don’t think Yorkshire can feel that they could in any way have done anymore. We’ve done as much as we can. We gave a guy that we rated very highly a fantastic package, we gave him his dream job and gave him everything he asked for in terms of responsibility. He wanted to bring in a fitness coach – we said he could. He said he wanted to bring in additional people and we said he could, when he could show us what the structure was going to look like and how it would pan out. We really thought we’d got the guy that was going to move the club forward. Yorkshire couldn’t have done any more.

 

The press are always going to try and look for a scapegoat and someone to blame but in my opinion the only person they can look at is Chris Adams. He’s the guy that’s reneged on the deal. He’s the guy that sat in front of a press conference and said he was coming.

 

There are a lot of people already talking about the Yorkshire v Sussex fixture at Headingley in June next summer when Chris Adams comes back to play against Yorkshire.

 

(laughs) An interesting match that’ll be! The guys in our dressing room will be fired up that’s for sure.

 

Do you think Chris Adams will get a warm welcome?

 

(laughs) I think he’ll get a traditional Yorkshire welcome.

 

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