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England and Wales Cricket Board chairman Giles Clarke has slammed the team that led the review of sport’s ‘crown jewels’ events after it recommended that the Ashes be returned to free-to-air television.

Clarke called the process, headed by former executive director of the Football Association David Davies, “deeply flawed” and said the “entire structure” of cricket would be damaged.

The ECB will lose millions of pounds in revenue if it cannot sell the Ashes rights to pay-TV broadcasters such as Sky, and Clarke told the Daily Telegraph: “I am greatly disappointed in this process, which appears to be deeply flawed from the outset.

“When the panel was first formed we recommended very strongly that they include a sports rights expert. They failed to do so. The panel has also ignored our demands that they commission an independent economic impact survey before considering whether or not to list Ashes cricket. We didn’t even get the courtesy of a reply from the final letter we sent on July 6.

“Before the Secretary of State makes his final decision or accepts any of the panel’s recommendations I feel he must conduct his own independent financial research into the impact on our sports.

“At the moment I am certain that neither the Government nor Sport England would have the resources to make up the considerable shortfall between rights revenues that at present come from the television broadcasters who compete in a fair and open bidding process.

“This could almost certainly lead to redundancies, particularly in the area of community cricket, and also significantly damage our highly successful grassroots and women’s programmes.

“The entire structure of our game would be threatened by a process which has failed all sports. The fact several members of the panel chose not to attend our verbal evidence showed they had either made up their minds in advance or always planned to ignore our evidence.”

As well as the Ashes, proposed additions to the list - which already features the Olympics, the FA Cup Final and the Grand National - include the Open golf championship, England World Cup qualifiers and Wimbledon, while the Winter Olympics, the Derby and rugby league's Challenge Cup Final would be removed.