“The old adage that ‘there are two sides to every story’ is not true. There is a story for every storyteller.” Kenneth Eade.
The parliamentary grilling of Yorkshire County Cricket Club (YCCC) takes place next week. Careers and reputations are on the line; it will not be pretty but will it, no pun intended, be balanced?
The background is well documented and the media have had a field day pursuing the belief that Yorkshiremen are club-wielding, clog-wearing, backwoods racists.
However, there are always two sides to a story and the narrative so far has been a one-way street. What is clear is that this has been a sorry episode of weak and misguided management.
Parachuted in as the new Chair of YCCC is a familiar face, fronting the English Cricket Board’s (ECB) South Asian Strategy (SAS) in 2018; I cannot help feeling he is the ECB’s stooge, a token, knee-jerk reaction. How can he be the best man for the job appointed overnight without any selection process?
Of the numerous articles written, there is one theme I find perplexing. YCCC must be racist because, given the demographic, only a pitiful number of Asians ever make it to professional cricket.
Strange how few question the comparable records here of counties such as Lancashire or Warwickshire nor the London-based counties? This is far more complex.
The single biggest problem within cricket is not racism but privilege. Consider this extract from a BBC article in 2019.
Cricket is one of the top 10 professions for independent school attendance – 43% of men and 35% of women playing international cricket for England went to private school…some 7% of people are privately educated.
The SAS is a divisive not cohesive policy as it targets one section of the population – read it here if you wish. It segregates not integrates.
As the money has poured into certain areas of Bradford, what of the other parts of the city where cricket is dying?
Significant money has also been wasted as I have shown previously. Yet to criticise is met with silence from those culpable.
So far as schools go, the game is dead in the state system, having coached within local primary schools for more than a decade. The private schools – Bradford Grammar and Woodhouse Grove – have facilities the state sector can only dream of.
This is why it continues to shrink as a mass participation sport, rarely in the consciousness of kids today.
But why don’t Asian kids come through the system in more numbers? I asked this many times as a coach.
An Asian teacher and parent offered two differing and interesting viewpoints, of the many I recall.
The teacher alluded to the desire of many Asian parents for their kids to do better than they had. That meant education, education, education through school and mosques. A professional sporting life was, in his words, too risky.
I spoke to the parent having watched his nine-year-old demolish my Under-13 team. The kid was special, as good as I had seen in twenty years. His Dad explained that the family simply could not afford the kit needed – it is expensive to play representative cricket – nor ensure that he could get to the games he needed which often involve considerable travel.
For those I coached who managed to get to a representative level, the parental and familial support needed was huge.
Imagine if the waste I wrote about in August, pushing an ECB policy to site non-turf-pitches by postcode, had been focused on talent?
The SAS is a tick-box exercise directed by witless idiots at the ECB and locally by even worse at Bradford Council. Eye-watering sums of money are being thrown down the drain still.
Believe it or not, Bradford Council plans to renew the pitches I highlighted despite no evidence of any usage and that they have been ripped to pieces. It is madness and it is our money.
Neither is this complex game easily understood so introducing yet another format – The Hundred – was only ever about the greed of the ECB.
The management of the game from the top-down is rotten. For ECB CEO Tom Harrison to claim that he had not read the internal inquiry report, as he said on R4’s Today programme (5/11) is a dereliction of duty; Teflon Tom should go.
This squalid period in the long and proud history of YCCC will also be defined more by the money as the legal vultures circle. Numerous jobs will be lost, perhaps even those of community coaches operating in the Asian areas, as YCCC faces financial oblivion.
Without international cricket and sponsors, the club is technically insolvent.
The damage has been done and any road back will be longer than the game can afford, both nationally and in Yorkshire. However, to strip YCCC of its international status solves nothing; it is gesture politics.
Depriving an already dwindling audience of the opportunity to witness the very best players in the world next summer is also pathetic. If they really wanted to address racism, what better than the visit of South Africa?
The MPs will only grandstand, the main characters hopeless puppets bound by the lawyers who will rack up fees draining the game of money that should be invested in the future, not the past. The spirit of cricket, a long-cherished notion, has been broken.
This has become a media witchhunt with even the government wading in trying to assert moral ground, in itself laughable. We are stuffed when we have politicians batting on this sticky wicket.
However, if the accusers turned their spotlights inwards, would they too find purity? We are human and we live and learn by experience, not by lawsuits.
Footnote
The resignation of Mark Arthur, CEO, was inevitable as was the limited statement he made, bound doubtless by the terms of his severance. However, having met him as he hauled me over the coals at Headingley a few years ago – politely – re my consistent objections to the SAS, he is no more a racist than a Yorkshireman.
Since we locked horns way back in 2014 – see my blog The English Cricket Board’s Big Dumb Idea – he has fronted this. Equally, his record as YCCC CEO stands with the best.
It will be interesting to see what he is prepared – or able – to say next week. For the record, I stand by every word I wrote seven years ago.
Simon says
Just read the article about Christmas lights and fireworks in town tonight. Can anyone explain to myself and my cat,why we couldn’t hear noise tonight but can hear the darned things all year round.
Sally Barrett says
Two sides to every story has certainly become reality today.After countless years of bullying and racism from the asian people,myself and family thank Mr Rafiq for his apology.As members of the Jewish community,who lost family in the holocaust.We pray for every race colour or creed,to not suffer in the same way.