Ed Warner on Sussex Cricket now and in the future, building a team to make fans proud – and getting off the ECB ‘naughty step’

He is now in the thick of the ‘rescue’ project – the hard work to get finances in order and get out of special measures imposed by the ECB. And Warner has told us he is confident Sussex fans will have a team to be proud of next season – even if the playing budget is being cut from £2.3m to £1.8m in one fell swoop.

We asked Warner why he wanted the job, what he thought of the current state of the club – and what members could expect to see happen on and off the field as Sussex CCC get back on an even keel.

Ed, what convinced you to take the role of Sussex chair?

The two previous sporting governance roles I've had have been with UK Athletics and now I've two years left to run as chair of GB Wheelchair Rugby. Both those, when I took them on, were a challenge in different ways.

UK Athletics was almost running out of cash and GB Wheelchair Rugby had lost its public funding, because the team wasn't considered to be good enough by UK Sport after the Rio Paralympics.

Both were a cause for me – they needed and deserved help. And my job, as much as anything, was to make sure there was financial discipline, – but also to be a cheerleader for them. And I believe we turned them both round. We won a gold medal in wheelchair rugby in Tokyo.

I look at Sussex – I like watching cricket, though I'm not a great cricketer – and this is another really deserving cause.

It's embedded in the heart of the community. Cricket across Sussex is very important, both at state schools and at club level. And it's, well I wouldn't say it's on its knees, but it's severely financially challenged. We know that because we've been given emergency funding by the ECB and been docked points for our men's team this year.

There's a serious situation. There's a recovery job to be done. And I think, I hope, I've learned enough in business, but also in sport over the last 20 years, to carry it on.

Down the years, I've written quite a bit about cricket in my weekly blog and I've been critical of some of the situations that have led to us being where we are.

People talk about the haves and have-nots in cricket. We don't have Test matches here nor a Hundred franchise. So we're up against that. But I think we can do it. And ‘doing it’, to me, is to stabilise it financially, but then make sure we can put a team out year in, year out that can compete well and excite the fans. I think we're already on the way to that.

A few weeks after starting, are you still glad you took it on?

I've not seen anything that's surprised me from the work I did on the outside looking at it. I've seen lots of good stuff, which encourages me, and I've found enormous goodwill among people in Sussex and Sussex supporters – fans, members – that says we can build on this.

I'm excited. I'm sitting here now, the sun's shining, Hove looks wonderful. What's not to like if you love sport?

We've got to get more people who love sport to come here, watch a good day's cricket and get behind a team which I think is going to be different next year – because it has to be financially. But we'll still be very competitive and can excite the fan base.

There's heritage here. This club goes back to 1839. That lineage is embedded in the club and there's deep roots to the fan base we can build on.

You've said you're already a way along the path of getting the right things in place – and an independent report talked about the need or change at board level. Has that happened?

These cricket clubs, they're nearly all the same. With one or two exceptions, largely they're owned by the members. And we have to have a board which has a blend of board members elected by the membership and board members we can appoint. We've just got one go-round to do to refresh the directors that are elected by the members.

We've a members forum on August 27 and we'll start an election process then. So I think by middle of the autumn, we'll have an entirely new board. That's not to pass judgment on anyone who was here before. But recommendation number 12 is a new board.

We've an interim chief executive and an interim finance director so we'll make sure we have, in a few months' time, permanent people in those positions. They may be the existing people. Mark (West, interim CEO) has been here a little while now. We owe it to the club to look as widely as possible and get the best people we can to run the organisation.

I've talked to our director of cricket, Paul Farbrace, frequently., and he's putting together a squad for next year which will meet our ECB limitations. We'll come under the threshold we've been set. It’ll be a blend of youngsters, but also experienced pros, lots of Sussex-developed players – I think it will be very competitive and people will want to pay to watch.

And that's critical. What we can't afford is just to say, oh well, we'll let the cricket go. We exist to put cricket on the field of play. And people want to come along thinking every day they come, Sussex have a chance of winning.

We will not win every match. No one does. But you want to be competitive. You want some local lads coming through that people can get excited about. And we've had some of them come through in the One Day Cup this summer.

We've not had a great record in the One Day Cup but we've blooded some youngsters. They excite us for the future.

If money always won in sport, no-one would watch – for example, Premier League football, you'd reckon Man City would win everything but that isn't the case. Sometimes the wealthiest clubs do poorly and clubs with tighter budgets do well.

Our job is to challenge those counties that haveTest match grounds and franchises in The Hundred that are much wealthier. If we're smart with our squad, if we've got good leadership, we can be a match for anyone. And that has to be our ambition.

We’ve heard of some imminent departures from the playing squad in recent weeks – and some joining. Are we likely to see more exits announced?

We've identified, or Paul Farbrace has, and Matt Walker, our incoming head coach, has given input to it, a squad of 20 players for next year, so it's a bit smaller than this season. There is some change at the margins, but the core of what we have at the moment will be the core of our squad next year.

It covers all formats and it's a squad we can work with and Paul and Matt can work with. There'll be some changes, some contracts to announce, which is encouraging.

By the time that members' forum comes around at the end of August, I hope that 20-man squad will be something we'll be able to talk about, and people will be able to say ‘Okay, next year, I know I'm going to see X, Y and Z.’

Let's remember, the County Championship season doesn't end until late September, – we've still got six four-day matches to play and we're challenging towards the top of Division 1 and there's still a lot to play for this season.

Some of those players are going to be a cornerstone for us next year and I think there's lots to excite them and for them to be ambitious about and for the whole county to be ambitious about.

We've not ruled off this season. Actually, we're only roughly halfway through the Championship season and we're really well placed.

How is the playing budget affected by cuts?

It will be £1.8m for next year. It's £2.3m this year. If you look at other counties, we're not going to have the smallest wage bill. We're not Surrey, no-one’s Surrey – apart from Surrey. But Surrey don't win everything, do they?

It's well known, and it's not popular in Brighton, I'm sure, that I'm a Crystal Palace fan. But that's a challenger club. I think Sussex County Cricket Club can be a challenger club, digging into those seven counties who have Hundred franchises, challenging them, beating them, putting their noses out of joint.

That's what we have to be about – by having smart leadership, great talent development and great coaching.

Finding a new role for Paul Farbrace must be a big boost, because it looked at one stage as though he was going to be leaving…

It's good in a number of ways. One of those ways, which has less been talked about but is important, is that as Director of Cricket, he'll be overseeing men's and women's cricket. The development of the women's game is vital for cricket across England, it's vital for us in Sussex. I think his expertise being brought to bear overseeing that will be huge.

We probably wouldn't have had Matt Walker coming in as head coach without Paul there. He's been instrumental in bringing Matt in and Matt clearly feels that he can work under Paul as director. I think that's going to be a great double act.

Matt will be just on the men's team, Paul's job is to give him enough support but also enough rope to be his own man. They've known each other long enough, they're both experienced, I think that's going to be a really strong combination.

You’ve talked about non-cricket events at Hove – are these on the radar?

There's a number of things we can do that begin to add revenue, which gives us more breathing space. We'll be smart about doing that. What you don't want to do is shoot for the moon. You can't play some lottery game with these other events.

There was a lot of talk and work done to look at redeveloping a part of the ground. The initial budget for that was £6m to £8m, but with the inflation and building costs we've seen across the country in the last few years, suddenly that was a £12m project.

That would have taken up half of our money from The Hundred that's sitting in the closet with the ECB. When you did the maths, you couldn't make it work. You’d need a wedding there every five minutes!

We've got a big enough ground here, we've got enough seats, let's get more people coming through here to do various things with the footprint we've got. Let's not be splashing millions of pounds on redevelopment. Let's be smart about what we do.

So, number one, I want to see more cricket here in the summer. That's one of my bugbears – we haven't enough of it, because of The Hundred. So let's find ways to persuade the ECB and others to let us have more cricket here. Maybe a T10 tournament, it could be all sorts.

This is a wonderful facility underused at the height of summer so let's find ways to do that. Then through the rest of the year, I think there are things we can do with what we've got that will bring money in without having to spend millions.

Then when we're more stable, when we've a bigger membership base, when we've more people coming to see us play cricket on a regular basis, we can have the confidence to do more.

But right now, let's remember we are a cricket club. Let's do that really well and be self-sustaining. Let's not be reliant on emergency loans from the ECB. Let's be well run and make sure we grow cricket across Sussex, men's, women's, disability cricket, kids' cricket, because that's where we'll find the players of the future.

We want to be known as a county that grows its own and if we then see ‘our own’ move to other counties because they're on an international pathway and there's more money, hopefully we've got the next conveyor belt of talent coming through to replace them.

It sounds easy, I know it's more difficult than that, but Sussex have down the years brought phenomenal talent into the English game.

Will part of your role to lobby the ECB to make the game better for Sussex and counties like them?

I have a reputation of speaking truth to power in sport. You don't have to be rude in doing that, but you've got to stand up for the organisation that you represent and its interests.

I'm not here to get lots of nice invitations from the ECB and be happy to accept them and kowtow at all. My job is to stand up for Sussex Cricket and probably to be doing that in collaboration with some of the other counties like us.

We need to co-operate with the Essexes and Kents and Somersets and Gloucestershires, because if you don't have a Test match ground, you've got an entirely different economic mix to those that have. We've got shared interests and we need to stand up for them. And I will do that.

Finally – a message to members and other fans… when the news of major problems and points deductions came out early this year, it was a big shock. Can you say whether they are safe from having that same shock again, at least in the near future?

I'm very confident we're going to hit our two immediate targets from the ECB. One is that we must lose no more than £1m this year – the year ends in October. And the next target is that we have a budget to break even next year and that we hit that budget. If we do those two things, there won't be any further points deductions and we'll come out of special measures in due course.

From everything I’ve seen in my first few weeks here, I'm very confident we will hit both those targets. And we are on a path to stabilisation and financial health and there's lots of work to be done to get us there. But I'm very confident with all that's happening at the moment that that is the case.

Members, I believe, will have a club they can be proud of, or even more proud of, going into next year and through next season because the turnaround will be complete and we will be off the naughty step, if you like, at the ECB.

The ECB have been hugely helpful to us in ensuring that we're well supported through difficult times. But I want to get to the point at which they say they'll leave us to it.