Lamb: 'Team of winners can light nation's spirit'

For Lamb was the man who got the sackcloth but not the Ashes. After batting on the stickiest of wickets over Zimbabwe - although he insists this was not the issue which finally made him walk - Lamb resigned. But not before helping to cement the foundations for the successful restructuring of English cricket.

He was at The Oval on Monday, and admits it was a poignant occasion for him. He says he was thrilled by the team's success and savoured the triumph of the day. But did he wish he was still part of it?

"No, not really," he said. "When I left last September, it was the right time for me to go. I felt I had taken the ECB as far as I could. There were one or two things I wasn't particularly happy with, and I suspect that there were one or two things that I was championing that weren't popular with the stakeholders.

"I don't have any regrets, I am very proud of what the ECB achieved. I don't miss some of the issues, but I certainly miss the people.

"It was great to be invited to the team reception so I could personally congratulate Duncan [Fletcher, the coach], Michael [Vaughan] and the players. Of course it would have been nice to have won the Ashes while I was still chief exec, but people who know the game know that not only myself but other members of my team all had a role to play. They know that we put those building blocks in place.

"It's not administrators who create teams, they enable teams to be created, and I like to think that Ian MacLaurin, myself and the rest of our team were those enablers."

Lamb, 52, and newly appointed as the chief executive of the CCPR, the "parliament" for Britain's 270 national sports governing bodies, says he was "deeply touched" by MacLaurin's tribute. "Ian and I had one core strategic object, to have successful England teams at all levels. We knew that if you can get any national team to be winners then it can light the spirit of the nation. It also creates heroes because it makes boys - and girls, because women's cricket was part of the strategy - pick up a bat and ball and play, and we also felt that the best thing for county cricket was to have a successful England team, because that feelgood factor cascades all the way down to the grass roots."

It was during Lamb's seven- and-a-half-year tenure that central contracts, "the main plank of the strategy", were introduced and the county game reorganised, though not without opposition. "There was quite a bit of resistance in the counties in the early days, and in the end we had to provide a financial incentive for them to do it. Of all the initiatives, that was probably the most important."

In his new role, Lamb, a former Middlesex and Northants medium-pacer, may have to deliver a few bouncers against some of those ministers who gave him such a hard time over Zimbabwe. "There are those who said I left because of the Zimbabwe issue, but that was not the case. It was a stressful and difficult time, a total no-win situation. We didn't get any help from government, which was disappointing. I thought we had covered the situation with senior civil servants back in July 2002, but then in the silly season of Christmas and New Year, politicians, ministers - and Alastair Campbell - suddenly woke up to the fact the England team was going to Harare in February; there was some mischief. It diverted attention from the impending Iraq war and it was easy for them to beat up the jolly old ECB, who were defenceless.

"It was all a bit of a mess. But looking back, I am not sure there was anything we could have done differently, though in terms of the actual tour to Zimbabwe in November 2004, as opposed to the World Cup, I think the Government respected our position."

With his new chairman, Brigid Simmons, a feisty sports businesswoman, Lamb will be looking to beef up the CCPR, which has a degree of independence not enjoyed by the quangos, giving it the sort of makeover he helped apply to the ECB. "There are far too many people who know that the CCPR is something impor-tant in sport but they don't quite know what it does, and raising the profile is one of my principal responsibilities. The CCPR can be a really important organisation, it can do things the others can't. We can be an effective lobbying organisation, we can fire bullets in a constructive way.

"Like the Ashes victory, getting the Olympics for London is a wonderful opportunity to galvanise the country. I'd like the CCPR to have a seat at the table when it comes to deciding what sort of legacy we want the Olympics to leave. I want to ensure it is one which will leave an indelible mark on sport as a whole."