Photograph: Richard Heathcote/Getty Images
Holding Up a Mirror to Cricket, the report unveiled on Tuesday by the Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket (ICEC), will make all but the most blinkered cricket aficionados reconsider the sport they love. The commission deserves credit for nailing the indifference to discrimination that has eaten away at the fabric of the game. Many have suffered cruelly for years. Others have attempted to blow the whistle on degrading behaviour, only to see very little change. For far too long, cricket’s hierarchy has been complacent and self-congratulatory over trivial attempts to right wrongs. The England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) has deluded itself into thinking that the sport could continue like a time capsule from the past – transmitting the “racism, sexism, elitism and classism” into a future that regards such bigotry, rightfully, as anathema.
Can a sport that is being outpaced by football risk not drawing on the full spectrum of the human experience, particularly by not seeking out talent that has been hitherto silenced or underrepresented? No, a search for such talent would only enrich the game. That is why the ECB ought to embrace the very sensible ICEC recommendations: to embed a commitment to inclusivity in its administration; establish an action plan to reverse the decline of cricket in black communities; seek to remove the class barriers that exist in cricket; allocate more resources to the women’s game and move towards pay parity between professional male and female players by 2029-30; and play women’s Tests at Lord’s rather than the Eton v Harrow and Oxford v Cambridge matches.
