Like most sports, cricket needs to make its headlines on the pitch. While England threatened to win the World T20 in Dubai, the UK media seemed happy to oblige. As long as Jos Buttler was racking up the runs, and Chris Woakes and Mark Wood taking wickets, all seemed well. Then came Jimmy Neesham and Tim Southee and it all fell apart.
By the time Australia were crowned champions and New Zealand came to terms with another defeat in a final, the Press had moved on to more serious matters away from the wicket. And they don’t come much more serious than Azeem Rafiq’s allegations of racism against Yorkshire.
His county cricket career over, he has been brave to stick his head above the parapet and tell it as it is. Yorkshire’s attempted cover-up, Gary Ballance’s unacceptable ‘banter’ and Joe Root’s ‘hear no evil, see no evil, let’s talk about the Ashes instead’ attitude have done cricket no favours whatsoever and now former players at other counties have also felt emboldened to blow the whistle on racist comments made by county executives. It’s no longer just a White Rose problem.
The ECB and Yorkshire’s sponsors have hit the county where it hurts but where will it end? Azeem Rafiq’s comments about “institutionalised racism” seem increasingly justified, which makes me angry given we’re in the 2020s, not the 1970s. In the Nineties, black cricketers seemed to be consigning ancient attitudes towards race to history, with the likes of Small, Lewis, Butcher, Cowans, Malcolm , Lawrence et al breaking into the elite. English Asians took a bit longer but Moeen Ali, Adil Rashid, Monty Panesar, Samit Patel, Ravi Bopara and others have since made their mark. And yet they have been sometimes badly treated, too.
Azeem Rafiq’s appearance before the Parliamentary committee yesterday promoted the issue of racism in cricket to the main story on the Six o’Clock News and things are now getting brutally ugly and personal. Ballance, Michael Vaughan and Tim Bresnan have all been forced to deny making derogatory comments to players of Asian descent. Someone is lying. Does Rafiq have an alternative agenda, aiming lethal barbs at former Yorkshire colleagues out of sheer spite? It seems unlikely. Which means those colleagues are lying to save their skins, reputations and lucrative contracts. Ouch! Nasty business.
I daresay many people
will just get on the anti-Woke bandwagon and lump Rafiq’s allegations in with
statue-toppling and knee-taking but they need to be heard, and acted upon, if casual
racism is to be eradicated and treated as wrong instead of normal practice. Let
the guilty be punished before the ex-spinner is forgotten. If the ECB wants the
headlines to concern the Ashes, the momentum must not be lost.
