At the end of a bruising disciplinary process undertaken to address charges of discriminatory language and behaviour at Yorkshire, the chair of the England and Wales Cricket Board, Richard Thompson, expressed his hope for peace.
“There now needs to be a time of reconciliation where, as a game, we can collectively learn and heal the wounds and ensure that nothing like this can ever happen again,” said Thompson, upon confirmation that Matthew Hoggard, Tim Bresnan, John Blain, Andrew Gale and Richard Pyrah had been found to have brought the game into disrepute, with the case against Michael Vaughan not upheld.
It is a sentiment that any right-thinking cricket lover would surely share. When Azeem Rafiq first went public with his experiences during two spells at Headingley back in August 2020, the spark of his words found dry wood and burst into flames in part because it tapped into a wider guilt about English cricket’s record on inclusivity.
A year earlier a dynamic and diverse England men’s team led by Eoin Morgan had won the Cricket World Cup. On a personal level, it was a career highlight to help Moeen Ali pen a column in the afterglow explaining how a group of players from different backgrounds had come together as one. And yet despite that golden day at Lord’s, the makeup of the professional game beneath the national side did not – and still does not – reflect the demographics of those playing it recreationally.
But if the sport’s broader acceptance of the need to address this offers some cause for optimism, the same cannot be said about the prospect of healing following in the case of this Yorkshire story. Over the course of nearly three years institutions have buckled in the search for clarity on the facts, views have become polarised and entrenched, the club has been left on its knees, and the human cost has spread far and wide.
Unacceptable language occurred at Yorkshire, the CDC panel chaired by Tim O’Gorman safely concluded, but by definition only those present at the time will ever know the full truth. All but Vaughan withdrew from the process some time ago, with the former England captain’s legal team able to pick apart the ECB’s argument at the hearing and the findings against the absentees something of an inevitability. Yorkshire accepted four charges as a club, with Gary Ballance doing likewise for his single charge.
Overall it has been a runaway train with a good few forks in the tracks en route. One wonders, for example, where we would be today had the club properly escalated the claims Rafiq made back in 2018 and, instead of releasing him at the end of the season, extended the contract of a player who had just suffered the trauma of a stillborn child.
Similarly the road to reconciliation may have been more easily found had Yorkshire not so ham-fistedly handled the Squire Patton Boggs report that was eventually commissioned two years later. Still unpublished, it remains the fullest look into the whole affair and upheld seven of Rafiq’s 43 allegations. Yet an initial attempt to first sit on its findings, before then releasing a summary on the same day the Old Trafford Test was cancelled, only added to the impression of a club acting shiftily.
It might have helped establish a fuller picture had the DCMS select committee used parliamentary privilege to publish the report, as previously promised by its chair, Julian Knight MP. Instead it heard Rafiq’s testimony, published his employment tribunal witness statement, and decided that was plenty. Knight has recently railed against a lack of due process after losing the Conservative whip in response to allegations about his conduct, and yet was happy for allegations to crystallise as facts with Yorkshire.
Another moment in time came two weeks after the first DCMS hearing when Yorkshire, under its new chair Lord Patel, terminated the roles of 14 individuals at the club. For one side of the argument this was justified, the group having co-signed a letter urging the club to push back against the narrative of its toxicity. Like the interview Ajmal Shahzad gave to the ECB’s investigation, they did not recognise the picture painted.
But no proper process was followed here, as reflected by the £3m black hole in Yorkshire’s recent accounts that denote compensation and legal fees. The move appeared a direct contradiction of Patel’s initial pledge to “take people on a journey”. As Kunwar Bansil, a British Asian physiotherapist who was among those dismissed, told the Times, the sackings “eroded trust and respect and are far more damaging to Yorkshire, cricket and society than they are in uniting communities”.
There is also a case to say the ECB should have outsourced its investigation rather than pursue the matter in-house. Even having done so, it remains perplexing that a number of potential witnesses were not spoken to. The CDC panel was also critical of the case against Vaughan, unconvinced that it was “sufficiently accurate and reliable”. The governing body’s conflict as both promoter of the sport and its regulator is one of the issues raised here and will be an ongoing source of debate.
Other questions still linger, not least the circumstances surrounding the deletion of potentially crucial emails from the IT system at Yorkshire, the timings of which remain opaque. It remains a hugely troubling aspect of the case.
The overall upshot to the saga is vast damage to individuals and not least Rafiq himself, having seen his character dragged through the mud – he never claimed to be perfect – and forced to relocate his family overseas due to threats. Other former employees of Yorkshire have endured the same and grave concerns about the mental health of some remain. Only Ballance, accepting his language was racist, has been able to properly start anew by returning to play cricket in Zimbabwe.
As such, with the sport also braced for another reckoning when the broader findings of the Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket are published, it is hard to see how healing will occur in the short term. Thompson’s assertion of “never again” feels the only thing everyone will agree on.
