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Rod Bransgrove has laid the blame for England’s Ashes disaster squarely at the door of the ECB and the batting coaches who oversaw the tour.
Hampshire’s chairman believes the county game should not be the scapegoat for the calamity and that it handed England a group of outstanding batsmen who have gone downhill within the international set-up.
Kevin Pietersen and Jonathan Agnew have called for the dismantling of the County Championship in response to England’s failings Down Under, but Bransgrove believes there is no chance of that happening. Instead, he thinks the ECB need to look closer to home.
Hampshire chairman Rod Bransgrove (left) says the blame for England’s Ashes disaster in Australia is with the ECB, in defence of the County Championship schedule
Bransgrove referred to Zak Crawley as evidence players have 'dropped off' in the England fold
‘It’s always pretty much the same — a few heads roll, there’s a new plan for English cricket, a review of the domestic game and we end up doing all the same stuff again,’ he told Sportsmail.
‘The real truth is that some of the players that domestic cricket has produced for England, including the likes of Zak Crawley, Joe Root and Ollie Pope, all these people started well when we first passed them to England. In fact, some of them spectacularly so.
‘Their performances have dropped off since they’ve been with England. I don’t think it’s fair to blame the county game for that because most of them
