The cost to Azeem Rafiq, to be laid bare painfully in front of a parliamentary committee later this month, has been years of personal turmoil, including thoughts of suicide. As an ECB statement has as good as admitted, the wider damage to cricket will be unquantifiable for a long time to come.
This escalating crisis engulfs every level of the game, and potentially every region, though it is in Yorkshire where the convulsions are hugely destructive — a county that has a vast resource of ethnic-minority cricketers on its doorstep yet has failed to embrace them for decades and has now alienated the next generation with its wretched handling of the Rafiq case.
A year ago Tom Harrison, the chief executive of the ECB, told The Times how he had heard dozens of shocking stories about discrimination in the game which had put inclusion at the very core of the organisation’s mission. “A lot of people have been pushed away from the game and I believe we can bring them back,” he said. It is hard to think what could be worse in that respect than this week’s headlines about a scandal the ECB called “abhorrent”.
If Harrison heads to Yorkshire, he will see the fall-out for himself. The suggestion that racial slurs from Gary Ballance, including the use of “P**i”, were delivered “in the spirit of friendly banter” provoked perhaps the saddest reaction of all — which was not outrage but a complete lack of surprise. The ECB may be shocked: few in Bradford are.
Taj Butt, secretary of Great Horton Church Cricket Club, who has spent most of his life involved in community cricket in the region, says that it is the time of year when the league nominates the most talented youngsters for Yorkshire’s pathway. Conversations with parents from South Asian communities are proving very difficult because many feel their worst fears — that their child has to be twice as good as a white counterpart to succeed — have been confirmed.
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There were, Butt says, enough “horror stories” about treatment of ethnic-minority youngsters even before this week’s alarming revelations about Yorkshire’s disastrous handling of Rafiq’s complaints.
“Every time you think it can’t get any worse it does,” he says. “What’s been highlighted is that this isn’t a one-off incident of one player being abused but it is running through the whole organisation. That means thousands are affected by it.”
The very families that cricket should be attracting are appalled. Butt asks, quite reasonably, would you trust the Yorkshire system with your kid right now?
It seemingly took an age for a panel to compile a report into Rafiq’s allegations of racism and bullying — seven of the 43 complaints were upheld — and then Yorkshire decided that the contents could not be published. Despite admitting that Rafiq was a victim of inappropriate behaviour, no player, coach or official would face sanction.
Talking to the BBC, Mark Butcher, the former England batsman, was incredulous that after a period in which race has been so openly discussed in the sport around the Black Lives Matter campaign, and Michael Holding’s brilliant monologue, and England players taking a knee and ECB demands for diversity, that Yorkshire had got it so badly wrong.
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“For all of that conversation to have continued over 18 months and hopefully people to have started to understand the insidious effect, you think, ‘OK the penny has dropped,’ ” Butcher said. “And then Yorkshire come out with a report and basically turn a deaf ear to the testimony and react to Azeem Rafiq’s complaints as you would expect in the 70s and 80s. It beggars belief.”
While not excusing any of Ballance’s language, Butcher said that at least the former England player had “taken a bit of responsibility” and called for Yorkshire’s hierarchy to do the same. He will surely not have to wait too long.
Rafiq’s claims have been supported by Rana Naved-ul-Hasan, the former Pakistan pace bowler who spent two years at Headingley in 2008 and 2009. He said that British Asian and other overseas players felt victimised but were compelled to remain silent.
“Myself, Azeem Rafiq, Ajmal Shahzad, Adil Rashid were the only four Asian players: we would often console each other over our unfair treatment by the management and coaches,” Rana told The Times. He talked of instances of a player fasting for Ramadan yet being instructed to take part in hard physical training, and players feeling like they were unfairly marginalised but unable to voice their complaints.
“I noted what happened but I never spoke out about it because who could I take the matter to? They’re all part of the club structure,” Rana said.
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The parliamentary hearing will gather more substance from Rafiq who has said that his first experience of racism in cricket came as a 15-year-old at Barnsley Cricket Club when, after victory in the league, he alleges that he was “pinned down” by team-mates and “forced to drink wine” despite being a practising Muslim.
There is deep sadness here in the story of a player who had two stints at Headingley between 2008 and 2018. Released months after he and his wife lost their first child, and plunged into depression, he continues to be targeted for online abuse.
Now he learns that he could have been charged for using “Zimbo”, a harmless abbreviation for someone from Zimbabwe, but a team-mate allegedly saying “Don’t talk to him, he’s a P**i” is off the hook. Ballance has claimed that his repeated use of “P**i” was in the context of two friends trading offensive names, his contrition mixed with a defence that he and Rafiq invited each other to their family homes. Somehow Yorkshire’s panel felt no need to act, but Ballance now faces ECB sanctions.
“I wanted to stress this is not really about the words of certain individuals,” Rafiq wrote on social media. “This is about institutional racism and abject failures to act by numerous leaders at Yorkshire County Cricket Club and in the wider game. The sport I love and my club desperately need reform and cultural change.”
The ECB is in no position to disagree. Indeed, it is compelled by its own words to act with full force.
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Cricket knows that it has a race issue. When the ECB launched the Hundred, it was on the back of research that showed ticket-buyers for professional matches were male (82 per cent), white British (94 per cent), with an average age of 50.
The Hundred has been the most high-profile attempt at trying to grow the audience, and other initiatives have been aimed specifically at South Asian communities. Some have shown promise. In Yorkshire, Butt is unconvinced.
He spent three years working for the Yorkshire Cricket Foundation, specifically on one of those ECB-funded initiatives in Leeds and Bradford with the 14-plus age group. “I went in with a passion for improving chances in the community but really what they wanted me to do was totally different from what I had in mind. I didn’t go in to tick boxes.”
He was persuaded not to walk away six weeks into the job but resigned after three years believing the scheme was just about showing that participation had increased rather than advancing the cause of players and their full integration into the Yorkshire system.
“We did make quite a lot of progress with the Yorkshire board at recreational level going back to the 90s. They set up a forum going right across Yorkshire. We had players like Adil Rashid and Ajmal Shahzad and one or two others coming through but we have gone completely backwards,” Butt says.
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“Through the ECB action plan they have put a number of things in place but they don’t serve the purpose, they segregate the Asian community from mainstream cricket. Now there is a separate programme and I think that’s where the problem is.”
Butt says that after he resigned Mark Arthur, the chief executive of Yorkshire, took him for dinner and said that he wanted to work together. “He made some promises but it hasn’t happened at all,” Butt said. “All they did was offer some tickets to an international match. I wasn’t about that.
“They invite people who are going to say the things they want to hear. If they complain they get marginalised.”
The ECB, which had to strong-arm Yorkshire into handing over its report, sought last night to prove that Harrison meant business when he said last year that counties could be hit with financial penalties for failing to meet diversity targets or properly tackle racism.
That promise was made on the back of “uncomfortable truths” including the fact that there were only nine black players and two black support staff in the county game in 2019. Suspending Headingley from hosting international games, and surely precipitating mass resignations from Yorkshire’s board, may only be the start.
What about meaningful change? This debacle is in a region that could — and should — have set a new standard in English cricket for being diverse. Yorkshire has long had a huge scope for inclusivity yet it only fielded its first ethnic-minority player, Sachin Tendulkar, in 1992, which was long after rival counties.
As Butt says, there are huge numbers of British Asians playing recreational cricket in the area but very few making the grade at Yorkshire. Harder questions will need to be asked now more than ever before about that disparity; the neglect, lack of opportunity and waste of talent.
Talking to Pratik Patel, from Sheen Park Cricket Club in west London for a view of the grass-roots game beyond the White Rose county, he is dismayed that the Rafiq case — “It’s not come as a great surprise,” he says — could set back progress.
“I was born in Kent then moved to London,” he says. “I have played for clubs where I was racially abused, or not given the opportunity despite being better than other players. I have seen it happen. It’s why I couldn’t play for those clubs.”
He has been on a pitch and heard abuse about terrorism and the Taliban thrown at Muslim players. He has also seen a mixing among communities that gives cricket a special place in British culture.
“The worry is that people are going to think ‘is cricket the sport for me?’ when there is football and other things out there to do. It’s why this cannot just be about punishment. The game from the ECB down has to show that it is learning from this case, and changing for the better.”
In Yorkshire, where parents from ethnic-minority communities are worried about sending their talented youngsters, and sponsors including Yorkshire Tea and Tetley’s Beer are running a mile, and the club hierarchy will be hauled before a parliamentary committee if they have not already stepped down and Rafiq prepares to give his damaging testimony, failure to change should not be an option. But many in the county have been saying that for a very long time. Decades, in fact.
