Lord’s redevelopment on hold after Major row

Lord’s owners Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) said Wednesday they would create a new redevelopment plan for the ‘home of cricket’ after a row which led former British Prime Minister John Major to resign from the MCC committee.

Major, in an unusually public dispute which has seen several members of English cricket’s establishment engaged in a bitter argument, quit in November after MCC announced it was scaling back its ‘Vision for Lord’s’ plan, originally conceived at a cost of $ 634 million in 2007.

This aimed to increase the ground’s 28,500 capacity on the back of a program of luxury flats built at the Nursery End of the ground and was supported by the Australian former MCC chief executive Keith Bradshaw, who now holds a similar post at the South Australian Cricket Association.

MCC then announced a new scheme which outlined a more modest ‘stand by stand’ redevelopment for the north-west London ground.

But with many MCC members upset by the way the whole issue had been handled and threatening action at Wednesday’s annual general meeting, the club’s committee announced it was drawing up a fresh plan.

This will be overseen by new MCC chief executive Derek Brewer, who took charge of the highly regarded redevelopment of Trent Bridge in his previous post as chief executive of Nottinghamshire.

MCC president Phillip Hodson said Wednesday: “MCC needs to look to the future. I want Derek Brewer – as of tomorrow our new Chief Executive – and Colin Maber (Chairman of the ground working party), who worked so well together developing Trent Bridge, to produce a development plan dove-tailing with the club’s strategic plan.”

It is more than 40 years since MCC ceased to run English cricket but it maintains worldwide responsibility for the laws of the game.