Yorkshire Cricket Racism Enquiry

Any of you following this, or at least the 'live' stream being put up by the BBC?

I'm struggling to make much of it based on the extracts given to date (that is, the extracts are too bitty to really get the full facts) - it does look like some players made comments in poor taste and some ill-judged attempts at humour that could be construed as having some racist or at least racial undertones. Whether deliberately racist or bullying I guess is what the enquiry outcome will reveal.

I'm only one degree of separation (and 35 years...) removed, in that when I was about 15 or 16 I spent some time assisting our club coaches in teaching Ishi Dawood some basic wicket keeping (he was about 11 or 12 at the time, coming through our under 13 team while I was in the under 17s ). The club (Hanging Heaton, in the Bradford League at the time) had mostly youth players of Pakistani heritage (typically about 7 or 8 of the XI in the UNder 17s), some of whom were amongst my best friends at the time. The only racism I was ever aware of was one very talented player a couple of years older was barred from playing Yorkshire Colts cricket because he'd been born in Pakistan, and at that time the Yorkshire-born rule was still being applied (checking Wikipedia, this rule was abandoned for the senior side in 1992, although I think may have gone a couple of years earlier for the youth sides)

Vaughan cleared on the balance of probabilities.

Can't see how they could have arrived at any other outcome based on the limited evidence.

Duty281 wrote:Vaughan cleared on the balance of probabilities.

Can't see how they could have arrived at any other outcome based on the limited evidence.

The way that evidence was gathered or, more pertinently, not gathered meant there could be no fair and reasonable finding against Vaughan. That should have been realised and acknowledged some time ago by those bringing the case.

I'm going to wade into this one a bit gingerly. I broadly agree with Duty and guildford that given the evidence presented there wasn't enough to find Vaughan guilty on balance of probabilities. That's perhaps inevitable when talking about an incident that happened what is now rather a long time ago, with only a few people potentially able to remember it. And the way people remember things is inevitably shaped by their own experience. So on the one hand someone who was well integrated into the club culture may have viewed anything Vaughan said as just a bit of harmless banter. On the other hand, for Rafiq, all the racist abuse he has been subjected to, both before and after the alleged incident, will have shaped his memory of said incident. So it's possible that Vaughan said something quite innocent at the time, but over the years it has transformed in Rafiq's memory into the racist "too many of you lot". It's also possible that Vaughan did indeed say exactly what Rafiq alleges, but that to others who were around it genuinely just seemed like innocent banter, to the point they forgot about it in the subsequent 15 years. We just can't say with any certainty.

What I do find frustrating about the whole process is something that was raised by Vaughan's defence team in fact. Namely that the ECB have seemingly chosen deliberately to focus on individuals (and of course the club). This by its very nature leads to confrontation, since it means each side essentially accusing the other of lying (or at least mis-remembering). Rather than focus on individuals and specific incidents, I would much have preferred the focus to be on the wider culture, or to use a controversial phrase the institutional racism that Rafiq and others encountered, and that results in so many young kids from Asian backgrounds playing the game only for so few to actually reach the top. But of course, a focus on that would inevitably have implicated the ECB themselves, so was probably never likely to happen.

When I talk about the wider culture, I don't necessarily mean straight-out racist abuse. It's often much more insidious than that, and more of an accumulation of seemingly harmless, or mostly harmless, comments that eventually take their toll. And of course if individuals speak out, they get told that it's only banter, they should learn to take a joke, etc. And if they persist they get labelled a "difficult character", as happened to Rafiq. It's this culture that I would have liked to have seen addressed by the inquiry, but as I said, I don't think that was ever likely.