Colin Graves set to receive big backing from members ahead of Yorkshire CCC EGM

An extraordinary general meeting will be held at Headingley on Friday (10am) to rubber-stamp the move, which will help to safeguard Yorkshire’s future.

The club has been hollowed out financially by the racism crisis and has debts and borrowings of circa £22m.

Graves, who will head a consortium set to pump around £5m into the business in the next five months, will not technically leave that EGM as chair.

A complicated, if mercifully short process given the drawn-out nature of the saga itself means that he must wait officially to join the board.

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) must approve the various changes taking place, a process set to take about 12 days. Tanni Grey-Thompson will serve as interim chair until matters are finalised.

Four board members have already resigned as part of the refinancing arrangement between Graves and the club – Lucy Amos, Nolan Hough, Yaseen Mohammed and Kavita Singh.

Harry Chathli, the current chair, and Trevor Strain will step down after the EGM, leaving a board then consisting of Grey-Thompson, Leslie Ferrar, chief executive Stephen Vaughan, director of cricket Darren Gough and members’ representatives John Jackson and Richard Levin.

The new board, once everything is finalised, will consist of three new faces in Phillip Hodson, Sanjeev Gandhi and Sanjay Patel, who are coming in with Graves. Grey-Thompson and Ferrar are set to stay on, while the chief executive and director of cricket positions will continue to be represented along with two new members’ candidates.

The near 90 per cent vote in favour of Graves, who was the club’s chief executive from 2002 to 2005, and again in 2012-13, as well as chair from 2005-2015, is significant given the hostility towards him in certain quarters.

His time in charge coincided with parts of a racism crisis for which he has apologised, despite insisting that he neither witnessed racism nor received any complaints about it, a point he is expected to reiterate at a hearing of the Culture, Media & Sport (CMS) select committee before which he has been invited to appear on February 20.

Chathli is also expected to attend that hearing to elaborate on the work that Yorkshire have done since the crisis started, and to explain why Graves – despite protestations to the contrary - was the only realistic refinancing partner in town.

However, concerns that the CMS has once more prejudiced its own hearing – chair Dame Caroline Dinenage, Clive Efford MP and Alex Sobel MP have already spoken out against Graves – were hardly assuaged on Tuesday when Sobel, the Labour and Coop MP for Leeds North West, ramped up his attack, claiming that progress could be lost under a man who is perhaps more popular in the opinion polls with the Yorkshire members.