On Wednesday morning Azeem Rafiq’s phone pinged as an email landed in his inbox from a professional sportsman – not a cricketer – seeking his advice about dealing with dressing-room discrimination. Messages like this are not uncommon for Rafiq these days, but the timing of this one was particularly poignant: he received it while he was in Auschwitz, contemplating the most violent and barbaric potential consequences of prejudice.
It is a little more than 18 months since Rafiq first spoke to the media about his experiences of racism at Yorkshire, setting off an explosive chain of events that has led to regime change at Headingley, a long overdue intensification of efforts to increase diversity in the county game, and the England and Wales Cricket Board being ordered to “get its house in order” by the sports minister, Nigel Huddleston. The revelations have also been transformative for Rafiq, turning him from a relatively obscure former cricketer into a public figure and campaigner against discrimination.
