A troubled reign in troubled times - Chris Waters Comment on Darren Gough’s departure from Yorkshire CCC

The only person smiling, it would seem, was Gough - all the way to the bank as reputedly the highest paid director of cricket in the country, despite Yorkshire now languishing in Division Two of the County Championship and in financial disarray.

The Bank of Colin Graves took one look at the situation, hitched up its trousers, readjusted the money belt digging hard into its waist and said: “Sorry, we need to make some savings.”

It was not a pleasant decision for Graves - he has been close with Gough - but a necessary one given that financial turmoil.

Yorkshire’s balance sheet (there has been a circa £10m negative swing since pre-Covid/the racism crisis) is such that it would have given Ebenezer Scrooge a heart attack long before the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Christmas Present and Christmas Yet to Come had ushered forward the winds of redemption.

Yorkshire haven’t got a pot to urinate in, as the saying almost goes, and Gough’s salary was, by any standards, lavish, not least considering his ability to fulfil outside commitments.

His overall package (thought to be worth around £325,000), plus those commanded by Stephen Vaughan, the chief executive, and Ottis Gibson, the head coach, who also earn more than their predecessors, amounts to circa £850,000; that’s before you factor in all the new HR/diversity staff (some of them handsomely remunerated), brought in after the racism crisis while hungry creditors held out their begging bowls and pleaded, to paraphrase another Dickens’ character, “please, sir, can we have some too?”

Gough returned at the height of that crisis, three days after Lord Kamlesh Patel, the previous chair, sacked the coaching and backroom staff without due process/investigation, a decision that cost the club millions and in which his board was complicit; shame on them all.

Some wondered too, considering that Gough had played with and been friends with many of the sacked, and part of the same dressing room himself (he was Azeem Rafiq’s first captain, the ultimate irony/inconsistency), how a) he could have been recruited in the first place and b) taken the job under those circumstances. Gough’s explanation was that he had “a huge passion and history of playing for Yorkshire”.

Ultimately, such questions are for the individual and their own conscience/situation; that feeling ran high - and continues to - was evidenced in these pages only the other day when Wayne Morton, the sacked former head of sports science and medicine, who described himself as a “second dad” to Gough, ventured the post-fatherly view that Gough’s return under those circumstances was “despicable”.

Whatever the optics or indeed ethics of the business, results on the field are what matters most to supporters and, at face value, Gough’s tenure was unsuccessful, although it must be assessed in the context of the singular challenges and circumstances faced.

In 2022, his first season, relegation followed on the back of a disaffected dressing room (there had been talk of strikes and black armband protests at the treatment of the sacked staff), the absence of adequate close-season preparation for the players due to the sackings, and what felt like a prevailing downward spiral, although the club did reach T20 Finals Day.

Last year, and although Yorkshire still would not have achieved promotion had the playing field been level, the club was docked 48 points in the Championship due to the crisis and particularly badly hit by the weather, relieved, in the end, not to finish bottom.

It is also thought, perhaps ironically, that Gough had less of a budget with which to work, while the uncertainty surrounding the points situation (the threat of a penalty hung over the club for almost two years) impacted on his ability to sign players, who did not wish to commit until they saw how the land lay.

Despite a successful career as one of Yorkshire and England’s finest fast bowlers, Gough came into the role with no direct experience and was appointed without due process/governance; Patel simply gave him the job.

Gough’s contacts and charisma were a welcome counterbalance - not least in terms of attracting sponsors, most of whom fled in November 2021 before many of the facts relating to the crisis became public. No expense was spared as Patel and Gough went about their work and, slowly but surely, a wrecked club peeked out from amid the ruins.

Gough certainly cheered the place up a bit in his own inimitable way but, ultimately, not those left white as a sheet by the balance sheet.