England v Australia: may disappear from terrestial TV

Major Hits Out over Sports Academy

Mr Major, who is a fervent cricket fan, said that dedicating the Academy primarily to Olympic sports showed that the Government had a poor understanding of the public's sporting priorities.

"The Labour Government's ill-judged decision to exclude three key national sports from the proposed academy shows how little they know or care about sport," he said.

"They have excluded precisely those sports which most bring the nation together - football, rugby and cricket," he stressed. "Team sports appear to be being treated as a dangerous competitive exercise by the politically correct commissars who now run the Ministry of Culture, Media and Sport. It is sheer political spite to exclude these sports."

Chris Smith: balancing act

"A national sports academy can't do everything" Dur: 1'23"

The former Tory leader challenged the Government to reverse its decision altogether, saying the Academy should be a centre of excellence for all sports.

Mr Major's love of cricket was reflected on the day he left Downing Street following the Tories' general election defeat, when he took solace by watching a game at the Oval.

The exclusion of cricket, soccer and rugby from the £100m project was one of the topics on the agenda when Lord MacLaurin, chairman of the England Cricket Board, met the Culture, Media and Sport Secretary, Chris Smith, on Monday.

Both sides emerged describing the meeting as helpful, with cricket chiefs winning an assurance that they would have access to the Academy's sports science and medicine expertise.

They signalled their intention to press ahead with plans for a separate cricket academy and a determination to press the Government hard for greater freedom in selling potentially lucrative broadcast rights to Test matches to satellite and cable broadcasters.

The home Test matches are one of the listed events, along with other sporting highlights such as the FA Cup and the Grand National, which are reserved for terrestrial television.

The cricket board is known to want the freedom to strike new deals with satellite broadcasters once the current package with the BBC and Sky draws to a close at the end of next summer.

After the talks, Mr Smith said he would be studying the board's proposals for a national cricket academy and promised to meet them again "to discuss how best to take these plans forward".

Earlier, he had suggested that a cricket academy might benefit from National Lottery funding.

"We do not want to write cricket out of the script. It may well be that an application to the National Lottery might be a good idea," he said.

He also refused to rule out the controversial possibility of offering cricket coverage to satellite and cable broadcasters. A sale of rights could raise up to £150m for a four-year contract. But it would anger British cricket-lovers, who have always enjoyed free access to televised test matches.

One possible model would see the rights to some games from a Test series sold to terrestrial television, while the rights to screen the remainder would go to satellite and cable.