SOMETIMES, when you feel wronged, it can be exceptionally hard to let go. It isn’t always easy to look to the future, when you feel furious about the past.

The start of the new County Championship season is now less than two months away, yet Durham supporters continue to collect signatures on a petition calling on the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) to overturn the draconian points penalty that was imposed when the club was offered a £3.8m rescue package last autumn.

Their tenacity is commendable, their anger justified. The ECB’s decision to saddle Durham with a 48-point penalty in the County Championship was unnecessarily harsh, and felt like vindictiveness when posited alongside the imposition of a strict salary cap and the stripping of Test status from the county’s Emirates Riverside ground.

Would the governing body have been so hard-hearted if it had been a Surrey or a Middlesex requiring financial assistance? Almost certainly not. The ECB cannot wait to plunder Durham’s emerging young players for the England Test team, but when it comes to supporting the long-term development of cricket in the North-East, they could hardly have been more dismissive.

Their attitude stinks, but that doesn’t mean it can be altered. So while Durham’s fans are right to continue railing against the authorities, those charged with getting the club back onto an even keel cannot afford to waste their time and energy on a battle they cannot win.

Earlier this week, Durham’s chief executive, David Harker, spoke to our cricket correspondent, Tim Wellock, and effectively sought to draw a line under everything that happened at the end of last season.

“Anyone associated with the club was disappointed by the sanctions,” said Harker. “But we entered into the agreement in a desire not just to preserve the club, but to create an opportunity to continue to build.

“It’s not that we don’t care, but with a new chairman and board, we have to look to the future. We can’t keep looking over our shoulders.”

Sadly, he is spot on. The brutal reality is that without the ECB’s financial assistance, Durham might well have gone to the wall. The club needed the authorities to bail them out, so were always going to be powerless to argue against whatever strings were attached to a rescue package.

That those strings were so restrictive is regrettable, but continuing to argue against them is going to benefit no one. Instead, it is time to look to the future and view the forthcoming rebuilding project as an opportunity rather than a chore.

On Monday, Sir Ian Botham will be formally presented as Durham’s new chairman to mark the start of a new era.  He will be accompanied by Simon Henig, the leader of Durham County Council, and having agreed to convert £3.74m of public money into shares in the restructured club in order to make it financially viable, the region’s politicians will have to take responsibility for ensuring the mistakes of the past are not repeated.

Durham have to rebuild along sustainable lines, but that does not mean they have to be uncompetitive. For all the problems of the last 12 months, the foundations the club is built upon remain strong.

Durham’s academy structure remains the envy of much of the rest of the country, and the latest crop of players emerging into the club’s first team look capable of living up to their billing as the next generation of North-Easterners hoping to make their mark at a national and international level.

While Durham’s budget might be closely controlled, the county retain a reputation for nurturing talent, hence the willingness of highly-rated overseas duo Stephen Cook and Tom Latham to commit to Chester-le-Street for the new season.

A number of key players might have left at the end of last summer, but plenty of talent remains. Paul Collingwood’s experience in his role as four-day captain will be invaluable, while Keaton Jennings’ presence as one-day skipper proves playing for Durham is no barrier to international ambitions.

Off the pitch, Botham is assembling a new board of directors that will be accountable to him rather than the ECB. Yes, the governing body will have an influence. But as Botham is expected to spell out in no uncertain terms on Monday, he would not have agreed to his new role had he simply been expected to kowtow to the ECB hierarchy.

He will forge his own path, with Harker continuing to be responsible for the day-to-day implementation of Durham’s new strategic development. Some might claim his presence in the former regime makes him unsuitable to continue in the new one, but Durham need cricketing experience in their new executive structure.

Some key questions remain unanswered. How will the Riverside ground be economically sustainable without Test cricket? Is the long-discussed hotel development now dead in the water? At what point will the Council look to sell its shareholding and refill the public purse?

The answers will become clear over time, but for now it is simply important to reaffirm that Durham have survived, and confirm the club are looking to the future with optimism. The events of the past are regrettable, but it is time to let them go.


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SO what do we make of ‘Pie-gate’ then? A load of fuss over nothing, or proof that the rampant commercialism that has enveloped football over the last few decades is capable of robbing even the most romantic of FA Cup stories of its lustre?

Wayne Shaw is adamant he was not the ‘five-figure winner’ that forced bookmakers, Sun Bets, to pay out when he was pictured eating a pasty – “it wasn’t a pie”, he insisted on TV – on the substitutes’ bench during Sutton’s FA Cup defeat to Arsenal, yet his motivation for indulging in the stunt remains unclear.

It’s easy to laugh at the ridiculousness of the incident, and it’s undoubtedly a shame that a man who used to keep Sutton afloat by looking after the club’s 3G pitch so it could be used by the local community has been made redundant. Similarly, it’s disappointing that the heroic efforts of Sutton’s players have been overlooked because of discussions over pastry.

But the harsh reality is that this wasn’t a meaningless kick-about in the park, it was an FA Cup fifth-round game and if we’re going to overlook potential irregularities here, we might as well overlook them everywhere. Eating a pie might not mean much in the grand scheme of things, but is it much different to deliberately conceding a last-minute penalty when you’re already 5-0 down?

The FA is investigating the incident, but it would do well to look at the whole issue of football’s cosy relationship with gambling. Perhaps a good place to start would be the FA’s own relationship with William Hill? Or maybe their previous decision to allow the FA Cup to be sponsored by Littlewoods?