Rob Andrew's arrival at Hove proves Sussex retain their bite
The left-field appointment of Rob Andrew as chief executive, after a decade at the RFU, gives Sussex an opportunity to remain relevant in a changing game
Andrew Miller24-Nov-2016Forty minutes into Rob Andrew’s first press conference as Sussex’s surprise new chief executive, after a bruising decade in the boardrooms of the Rugby Football Union, and it is abundantly clear (as if there had been any doubt) that he is not about to pull up a deckchair and settle for a sinecure among the seagulls and seasoned cricket fans at Hove.”I thought people came to the south coast to take it easy!” he jokes, as the questions from the floor turn from the prosaic to the political, with Sussex’s adversarial stance in the ECB’s brave new world of city-based cricket right at the forefront of the topics.Sussex, after all, were one of three counties – Surrey and Kent being the other two – who, back in September, stood firm in voting against the ECB’s move towards a solitary option for the future structure of England’s revamped T20 competition. And for that reason, and regardless of the initiatives that the club themselves might prefer to showcase – most particularly their county-wide commitment to the grassroots game – no one’s in any doubt about the issue that will dominate Andrew’s tenure.”We are not Luddites,” insists Jim May, Sussex’s chairman, waving an arm towards the pavilion window to emphasise his point. “We were the first county ground to install floodlights: fact. We were the first county ground to have a dedicated academy; this year we were the first county to have a dedicated women’s academy. We are not looking in the rear-view mirror all the time. But we do have doubts about the city competition.”Sitting alongside him, Andrew is understandably diplomatic in fielding enquiries about a role that he will not officially be taking up until January 3. But if, in the course of his RFU career, he gave off the impression of being the ultimate insider – seemingly above reproach as five England coaches passed below him through the corridors at Twickenham – he’ll be discovering soon enough how the land lies now that he’s on the slippier side of a club v country divide.”I knew, right from the start, that this was going to be full-on,” he says. “But the one thing I have been very close to in the last 20 years is politics in sport. Sport is big business now and I’ve seen how people try to manage that mix. I’ve seen it when it goes quite well, I’ve also seen it when it goes badly. Understanding those issues, and trying to pick your way through and get to a solution, is really challenging but very rewarding.”According to May, it was Andrew’s range of “transferable skills” from rugby to cricket that propelled him to the top of a list of 50 applicants for the job – and he transferred plenty of those back in his playing days as well, representing Cambridge University and Yorkshire 2nd XI in the mid-1980s before the demands of his rugby career took over from his passion for leather and willow. But it is Andrew’s status as an unequivocal household name that is surely every bit as valuable to Sussex in cricket’s uncertain current climate.In his 12-year England career, Andrew amassed 71 caps at fly-half and featured in three World Cup campaigns and as many Grand Slams. And, as a man who has been immersed in administration ever since, with seven years as director of rugby at Newcastle prior to his time at the RFU, his views can be expected to resonate beyond the sometimes cloistered walls of English domestic cricket. By extension, they will tackle at source that thorny issue of relevance that stalks the sport in general but the smaller clubs in particular.”Rugby and cricket are at similar levels in the public consciousness,” Andrew says. “The funding from the ECB into the counties is very similar to that from the RFU to the clubs. And the question of how do you get players through the system to produce a successful England team is very similar too. When Hugh Morris [former director of England Cricket] was at the ECB and I was at the RFU, we shared a lot of thoughts.”Rob Andrew is unveiled as Sussex’s new chief executive•ESPNcricinfo LtdSo, when Andrew points out – as he does – that one of the greatest strengths of English cricket is the fact that its 18 first-class counties are spread from the tip to the toe of the country, or states that there are “kids all over Sussex who are dreaming of being the next Haseeb Hameed, and it’s our job to make that possible”, his words are “music to the ears”, not only of his chairman sitting alongside him, but to the representatives of the other non-Test grounds who may at last have hit upon their spokesman for the disenfranchised.”Against a complex backcloth, and with people taking positions, it will be extraordinarily helpful having Rob,” May says. “He will provide a safe environment for the cricket management, but not an unchallenging one, and his profile will undoubtedly help us in the commercial world.”Much of that commerce will inevitably depend on the ECB’s vision for the future of its domestic T20 competition. As an upshot of September’s meeting, the plan as it stands is to replicate the compact schedule and structure of Australia’s Big Bash League, even if the current travails of Australia’s Test team serve as a timely reminder of the dangers of becoming over-reliant on short-form gains.Though the details differ, the somewhat shrill tone of the T20 debate is one to which Andrew believes he can relate, given that his focus for the past two years has been the new long-term agreement between the RFU and England’s leading clubs over the release and funding of the elite player squad. The original deal, which he was instrumental in brokering back in 2008, had been a similarly watershed moment for English rugby, given the bad blood and suspicion that had coloured so much of the landscape since the dawn of the professional era.”In rugby we found an English solution to an English problem,” says Andrew. “I think the same has to apply to cricket. I don’t want to point fingers elsewhere but has Australian cricket gone too far in one direction and impacted the long-form side of the game?”May, for his part, isn’t so concerned about holding back, warning (with perhaps more mental imagery than he had intended) of a Hinkley Point-style meltdown if the ECB insists on driving through changes to the domestic structure when, in his opinion, there is insufficient evidence that they are either necessary or suitable.”There are at least three big differences between here and Australia,” he says. “Number one, nearly all the population of Australia is in a few cities by the coast. Number two is that the weather’s guaranteed, which it isn’t here. And the third thing is, it’s a very different media landscape in Australia. All their major sports are on free-to-view TV.”Our anxiety is that if we go down that route, would non-host counties like Sussex be marginalised in the long-run? It’s a really difficult trade-off, because we’re trading off what’s best for English cricket, whatever that is, against what’s best for us.”And to Sussex’s credit, notwithstanding their relegation in 2015, the club has been one of the genuine powerhouses of the two-division era precisely because it has known how to make the best of its relatively straitened circumstances. Last year’s departure of coach Mark Robinson may have severed the final link to the side that won three County Championships in five seasons, including their maiden triumph in 2003, but in May’s opinion, the seeds of regeneration have already been sown.It is with justifiable pride that May points out that the club has no external debt, unlike several of the Test-match grounds – most notoriously Durham, but the likes of Yorkshire and Warwickshire too. Much of that is a legacy of the work put in place by Andrew’s predecessor, Zac Toumazi, who announced his intention to step down last month after four years in charge, but equally it stems from a trenchant recognition that top-down business models lack sustainability in a crowded market.Looking around Hove, with its rows of well-appointed flats peering over the boundary from the neighbouring streets, it is clear that England’s oldest county never had an option but to cut its cloth accordingly. Not for them the notion of “build it and they will come”, as advocated by the old ECB hierarchy. Besides, as May freely admits, there’s a degree of wealth in the ever-expanding conurbation of Brighton and Hove that makes looking after existing markets more relevant than might be the case the further north you travel of London.But if there is one tenet of the board’s new regime with which the Sussex hierarchy wholeheartedly concur, then it is their new “Cricket Unleashed” strategy, launched this summer with a view to driving participation in the recreational game. On Toumazi’s watch last November, Sussex’s professional club and its cricket board, which represents 245 clubs throughout the county, were merged to create a new centralised body. It is a change that Andrew plans on embracing.”Sussex is probably the first county to put whole of their cricket under one umbrella, and that is really important to me,” he says. “All sports have to build from the bottom up, because eventually that’s how you get the right group together for long enough with the right talent. I first saw Jonny Wilkinson when he was 11 years old. George Ford and Owen Farrell were once seven-year-olds dreaming of playing for England. That’s what sport is about for me.”Teams take time to build, it will take a bit of time for this new Sussex team, after a successful period, to grow. But there’s nothing better than watching young players grow and fulfil their potential.”