Middlesex’s chief executive, Andrew Cornish, has risked antagonising the England and Wales Cricket Board by appearing to criticise a central element of the counties’ new diversity rules that come into force on Saturday.
At a club forum last week Cornish told Middlesex members “we’re not gonna be woke and just do political correctness” before criticising “token” appointments based on “gender or ethnicity”.
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Cornish was responding to a question from a member about the lack of diversity on the Middlesex panel, made up of three white men: Cornish, the chair, Richard Sykes, and the director of cricket, Alan Coleman. In reply Cornish said: “Our board and our committees are incredibly diverse … and meet all the diversity standards that we need,” although that will not be case under the terms of the new ECB agreement with the counties.
The new County Partnership Agreement beginning on Saturday includes enhanced targets for diversity and gender parity, most notably the stipulation that 40% of appointments to county boards and governance committees must be female. Previously the threshold was 30%.
There are four women on Middlesex’s 13-strong board and the club’s committees are 79% male, so changes will be required to comply with the CPA, the mechanism through which the ECB distribute around £120m of annual funding to the professional game.
The ECB’s Equality Diversity and Inclusion action plan 2025-28, which was published last October, states: “In the new County Partnership Agreement there are enhanced standards, including a requirement of 40% minimum of each gender, and updated ethnic diversity targets to reflect the 2021 UK census.
“This action plan will be underpinned by an annual operational plan – a series of detailed tasks to deliver on the commitments. We will publish annual progress updates, as well as a detailed State of Equity in Cricket report in 2026.”
The ECB hand out millions to each of the 18 counties and have powers to withhold funding if diversity targets are not met. Middlesex have had a difficult relationship with the ECB in recent years, and in September 2018 were fined £50,000 and given a suspended points deduction for mis-spending funding that had been allocated to the county to support youth-team and grassroots cricket. The possibility of losing more funding would be a major blow to a county who have not recruited any overseas players in the past two seasons due to financial restrictions.
“Our board and our committees are incredibly diverse,” Cornish said at Middlesex’s members forum, which was a private event. “They meet all the diversity standards that we need. But being blunt, we’re not gonna, I hate the word, but we’re not gonna be woke and just do political correctness for political correctness.
“The club is governed and run by a very, very diverse group of people. It’s unfortunate you’ve got our three ugly mugs here now. But I don’t think anyone, including anyone that was plonked on this presentation group just because they were of a certain gender or ethnicity would value that either.
“We have regularly had our CFO, Illa Sharma, on every forum since she’s been at the club, she just is not at this one today. So we are fully committed to that, but neither will we go through tokenism either. That’s even worse.”
Middlesex and the ECB have declined to comment on Cornish’s words. His comments raised eyebrows among some Middlesex members, particularly as the issue of diversity has caused the club problems in the recent past. In 2022 the then chair, Mike O’Farrell, was criticised strongly after he told a parliamentary select committee that cricket’s lack of diversity was down to black players preferring football and rugby and the Asian community prioritising education.
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“The other thing in the diversity bit is that the football and rugby world becomes much more attractive to the Afro-Caribbean community,” O’Farrell told the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport select committee. “And in terms of the south Asian community, we’re finding that they do not want necessarily to commit the same time that is necessary to go to the next step because they sometimes prefer to go into other educational fields, and then cricket becomes secondary. Part of that is because it’s a rather more time-consuming sport than some others. So we’re finding that’s difficult.”
Despite widespread criticism, including from the first black woman to play for England, Ebony Rainford-Brent, Cornish defended O’Farrell and he was made a life president of Middlesex at the end of his term as chair.
The ECB’s enhanced EDI targets are a direct response to the damning report from the Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket published two years ago, which concluded that there is “a widespread culture of sexism and misogyny” in cricket and that racism had been “normalised.” The scale of the problem was recognised by the ECB, who have published a 12-point action plan committing to an extra £5.5m in funding to promote greater diversity, as well as setting new targets for gender and local ethnic representation.
The lack of gender parity in the professional game is stark, with no women among the 18 county chairs, just one chief executive and only 11% female representation on county boards.
