Hats off to former Yorkshire chairman Keith Moss for continuing to employ his organisational skills even after being unceremoniously forced out of office by the county club when the cash crisis unfolded last year.

First, Moss mooted the idea of the Bradford League marking its centenary this year by playing a challenge match with the Yorkshire League at the Scarborough Cricket Festival and then agreeing to sponsor the game which will be held on Tuesday, August 12.

Now he has gone ahead and arranged a 364 Ashes lunch at Headingley on August 28 to celebrate the 65th anniversary of Sir Len Hutton's 364 against Australia at The Oval and the 50th anniversary of the great batsman leading England to their Ashes triumph during the summer of 1953.

Moss, who is president of Pudsey St Lawrence Cricket Club - which is where Len started out and retained a lifelong interest - has good reason to want to do something to perpetuate Hutton's memory.

He was a close neighbour of the Hutton family and he and Len were lifelong friends with a shared passion for cricket in general and Yorkshire and Pudsey St Lawrence in particular.

If the lunch is a success (and with tickets at £25 a head and Tom Graveney as the guest speaker it certainly should be) then Moss hopes to form a 364 Club comprised of people who either played cricket with Len or knew him personally.

Moss could so easily have taken his bat home last year when he was made the scapegoat for Yorkshire's huge financial mismanagement and had to resign as chairman before he was pushed.

It was a dreadful experience for him and one which he felt very deeply after being responsible for masterminding the complete redevelopment of Headingley without which Test cricket would no longer have a future on the ground.

His style occasionally seemed autocratic to some other members of the now defunct general committee but no-one else was prepared to commit the time or energy to the job which he did.

And it would be wrong to blame Moss for the escalating costs of the redevelopment because more than £1m had to be spent in excess of original estimates simply because Health and Safety insisted on further modifications to the new East Stand and cricket school for handicapped users.

At the same time, money was haemorrhaging from the club because of marketing blunders and there was simply insufficient income to cover the extra financial burden.

Moss must also allow himself an occasional wry smile at the difficulties still confronting the new management board, who blamed the general committee for getting Yorkshire into a mess but have yet to improve substantially the club's affairs or bring renewed success on the field or peace and tranquillity off it.

True, the board have kept the club afloat for which everyone is grateful, but the stark truth is that performance-wise the team have never been in worse shape and the new members' committee are at odds with themselves, the majority of elected representatives not liking being told what they should do and how they should do it by the appointed members.

Updated: 10:08 Saturday, June 28, 2003