WHITE WASH
What was worse: the despicable, casual racism at Yorkshire County Cricket Club… or the shabby attempt at running from the truth when it was exposed? In devastating detail, GUY ADAMS lays bare the scandal convulsing the sport
gations, Rafiq told how as a Muslim he’d been made to feel like an ‘outsider’ at the club, saying racist abuse had become part of dressing room culture and adding: ‘I know how close I was to committing suicide during my time at Yorkshire.’
During one game in Scarborough, he revealed, a spectator kept abusing ‘P***’ players. When comments were reported by another member of the crowd and by Rafiq, it emerged that the individual concerned was the grandfather of another player. Yorkshire refused to mount an investigation.
A second incident he recalled involved a Muslim boy in the crowd having a pint of beer thrown in his face. When the dressing room was informed, the players laughed. Again, the perpetrator went uninvestigated, Rafiq claimed. ‘The boy was given a jumper by the club,’ he recalled, ‘but the laughter told me what people really thought.’
In September last year, Rafiq gave a series of follow-up interviews. They were even more damning. Speaking to the BBC, he said of team-mates: ‘They would stereotype me and say “He stinks”. On a pre-season trip to Dubai, one of the players said “Don’t speak to him, he isn’t a sheikh, he hasn’t got any oil”. I have left a lot of nights out in tears.’
He also claimed to have reported an individual to Yorkshire’s director of cricket Martyn Moxon and coach Andrew Gale in 2017.
‘While I was pouring my heart out, the director of cricket was too busy looking at the clock. He wasn’t interested.’
A NEWSPAPER heard claims that he and other British Muslim colleagues were referred to as ‘you lot’ and ‘the Asians’.
Yorkshire initially responded to the claims by saying that its ‘equality and diversity committee’ would look into them. When it became clear that wouldn’t wash, a law firm was hired to lead a formal inquiry. But news that the firm, Squire Patton Boggs, was the former employer of Yorkshire’s chairman, Roger Hutton, raised eyebrows.
In a further unwelcome move, senior cricket officials began publicly attacking Rafiq. Roger Pugh, a retired civil servant and chairman of Yorkshire South Premier league, chose to describe him as ‘discourteous, disrespectful and very difficult’ to deal with.
At this point, a second former player said he had also suffered racism at the club.
Rana naved-ul-Hasan, who played with Rafiq in 2008 and 2009, said he ‘fully supported’ his criticisms of Yorkshire (adding that at Sussex and Derbyshire, where he’d also played, he had never suffered racist abuse).
‘There was systematic taunting and it’s tough to do much about it,’ he said of Yorkshire. ‘To us as overseas players from Asia, when you are not able to perform, the home crowd which should be supporting us, instead they are hooting and taunting us with racist slurs like “P***”.’
last november, Rafiq was invited to give evidence to the inquiry. In addition to his previous claims, he said the club had discriminated against Asian players in its academy, saying he once read an internal email saying ‘only a few P***s are okay to go through. We cannot have too many of them’ when deciding which young players would progress through the club’s pathway programme.
The following month, three other witnesses alleged they had experienced racism at Yorkshire. Taj Butt, a coach, said he’d offered his resignation within six weeks of joining the county because of the use of racist language.
Tony Bowry, the cricket board’s cultural diversity officer between 1996 and 2011, told the inquiry: ‘Many youngsters found the dressing room very difficult and unwelcoming, as a direct result of racism they faced. It affected performance... they were labelled trouble-makers.’
Tino Best, an overseas player, said: ‘Some of the things I saw towards the players of Pakistani descent wasn’t good. Every day I could hear them complaining about how they were being treated.’ It was separately reported that Rafiq had been referred to in the dressing room as ‘Raffa the Kaffir’, a term commonly used in apartheid-era South Africa to denigrate people of colour.
So far, so ugly. But the nail in Yorkshire’s coffin was not just the appalling nature of these allegations, but the indefensible way in which the club chose to respond to them in August, after the 100-page report by Squire Patton Boggs had finally been completed.
It appears to have found that at least seven claims made by Rafiq were true. But in their initial response, Yorkshire refused to concede that he’d suffered racism. ‘Sadly, historically, Azeem was the victim of inappropriate behaviour. This is unacceptable. We would like to express our profound apologies,’ was how the club put it.
Yorkshire also refused to make the report public, or to share a copy with the ECB (whose lawyers were given one only last week). Indeed, it only agreed to release a summary of findings in September. At which point the county finally confessed that he had indeed suffered racism.
‘Prior to 2010 there were three separate incidents of racist language being used by former players which were found to be harassment on the grounds of race,’ read the summary. ‘Before 2012, a former coach regularly used racist language,’ it added, and ‘during his second spell at Yorkshire between 2016 and 2018, there were jokes made around religion which made individuals uncomfortable about their religious practices’.
In addition, the report conceded that when Rafiq raised the alarm in August 2018, ‘there was a failure by the club to follow its own policy or investigate these allegations’.
FINALLY, said the summary, ‘on a number of occasions prior to 2018 the club could have done more to make Muslims more welcome within their stadiums and should have dealt better with complaints of racist or anti-social behaviour within those stadiums’.
For all that, however, Yorkshire still refuses to accept any charge of institutional racism. last week, it announced that a panel which had met to discuss how to respond to the report had decided not to discipline a single player, or member of club staff.
Astonishingly, the panel claimed that much of the racist abuse Rafiq suffered, which included being regularly called a ‘P***’, had been ‘banter’. Its members therefore claimed that he had no right to be offended. What’s more, the panel added that, were he still at Yorkshire, Rafiq himself should face disciplinary action for referring to a Zimbabwean player as a ‘Zimbo’, which it described as a ‘racist, derogatory term.’
The club appeared to be sticking to this bizarre line last night, even after its chairman and two board members had resigned.
Short of an immediate and complete U-turn, it’s hard to see how this scandal ends unless almost every senior figure’s head rolls.
For in the same way that a fish rots from its head, English cricket seems to be rotting from its beating heart.