Azeem Rafiq sat well outside cricket’s consciousness in July 2020. It had been nearly two years since Yorkshire had let him go for a second time and it took an interview with the Professional Cricketers’ Association, published on its website and probably read by a handful of people, to bring him back into my mind. The subject was a new business Rafiq had opened with his family, a tea shop in Rotherham. While mapping a future outside cricket, he still had ambitions to keep playing.
I arranged an interview with Rafiq because I wanted to know how a once trailblazing Yorkshire captain found himself out of professional cricket at 29. We got talking about the players he’d once led for England’s under-19s – Ben Stokes and Joe Root among them – his ambition to become an international coach and, most painfully, the tragedy that had underpinned the last couple of years: the stillbirth of his son. In the wake of George Floyd’s death, I wondered about his experiences as a British Asian making his way at Yorkshire, a side that had once excluded players born outside the county’s boundaries.
