ECB tells counties their money from Allen Stanford is safe Giles Clarke, the chairman of the ECB, has strengthened his position since the Stanford scandal and is set to be re-elected unopposed for a third term. David Collier, the chief executive of the ECB, who was also at the forefront of organising the deal with Stanford, is also possibly on the verge of promotion by taking a similar role at the International Cricket Council. It is thought he is on a shortlist with at least two other candidates, one from Australia and another from New Zealand thought to be Martin Snedden, who narrowly missed out recently on the chief executive's role at the MCC. The board of the ECB, meanwhile, will meet at Lord's on Thursday with pressure mounting on them to defer a decision on whether to implement a shake-up of county cricket proposed in the Morgan Report. The report, which was compiled by former International Cricket Council president David Morgan, recommends reducing the County Championship to 14 matches per county from 2014 and a return to 50-over cricket for the domestic competition. But opposition to the report has grown since Morgan's recommendations were first published in January with the Professional Cricketers" Association, county coaches and the ECB's own cricket committee coming out strongly in favour of the retention of a 16-match County Championship. County chairmen and chief executives are in favour of keeping a 40-over one-day competition. The ECB board, who have already approved the report in principle, must now decide whether to accept Morgan's recommendations in full and run the risk of unrest around the counties or tinker with the report's findings, which is something they have pledged not to do. Scrapping the report at this stage would be an embarrassment for Morgan, one of cricket's leading administrators, who claims to have spoken to 300 people before drawing up his recommendations. But there is growing support for deferring a decision on his recommendations to allow time for changes to the structure of county cricket that will come into force this season - including a reduction in the number of Twenty20 matches from 16 to 10 per county - to be assessed. "It's an unenviable task for the board but I think there is very little chance of the report going through unchanged because there are so many things in it that people have issues with," said Worcestershire chairman Percy Price. I'm a great believer in, if it ain't bust, don't fix it. As a club, we are fully supportive of a 16-match format with two divisions of nine teams, as is the present situation. "We feel the loss of integrity caused by a non-symmetrical system where you play some teams once and others twice is not an option and does not out-weigh the benefits created by reducing the number of days" cricket the players play." Northamptonshire chief executive David Smith also believes that a balance can be struck between cricket and commercial requirements with only a minor tweak to the existing structure rather than the major changes proposed by Morgan. "I think that the structure that we have got for this summer is probably as good as we are going to get given the volume of cricket," Smith said. The only tweak that I would like to see is to have the Twenty20 competition spread out over a slightly longer period of time to avoid the ludicrous situation we have this year of having to play three home matches in a week.