Azeem Rafiq: Yorkshire CCC has a long tradition of off-hand brutality

There will, alas, be more revelations, accusations, recriminations and apologies before the wretched saga of Yorkshire CCC, racism and Azeem Rafiq is over. The consequences have already spread to other county clubs and indeed to the England team. Social media will be trawled for injudicious, silly and sometimes nasty messages posted by naïve or thoughtless young men.

Indeed, Yorkshire’s victim, who has deservedly won much respect for his dignified and moving statement to the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, has himself been confronted with an apparently anti-Semitic post he made ten years ago when he was nineteen or twenty.

He is ashamed and contrite, just as Ollie Robinson – the Sussex and England pace bowler – was when on the day of his Test debut against New Zealand this summer someone published offensive messages he had posted as a callow youth.

There is no reason to think Rafiq is anything but sincere in repudiating his anti-Semitic message and apologising for it. It is probably malicious unearthing now may be of some value, for it should remind us that we have all – most of us anyway – said, written and done things which, brought years later to mind or public notice, make us curl up in embarrassment and shame. “Use every man after his desert, and who should scape whipping.”

At the moment, Yorkshire CCC is at the whipping post, and few at present have a good word for the club or will say its disgrace isn’t thoroughly deserved. Its officials showed no sympathy for Rafiq, and seem for years to have regarded him as a tiresome self-pitying nuisance. Well, Yorkshire committee-men and officials have never rated high on empathy.

They have been known to treat even local heroes with off-hand brutality, for instance stripping Geoffrey Boycott of the club captaincy in the week of his mother’s death, and a few years earlier, ending the Yorkshire career of the club’s greatest captain, Brian Close, abruptly and with a total absence of sympathy or even a word of regret.

Yorkshire’s self-righteousness is the obverse of the county’s characteristic virtues: a flinty pride in their heritage, a dislike of sentimentality, a readiness to speak their mind, strong opinions, respect for hard work, and a warm sense of family.

They didn’t – and I would guess, couldn’t – take Rafiq’s complaints seriously, not so much because they are racists, for I would guess that those involved in dealing with Rafiq, would indignantly deny that charge, and not just on the “some of my best friends are Jews” line, but because his complaining seemed unmanly. “If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen” – that’s the attitude.

Still, it has got the club found accused of “institutional racism” and, since that term means anything, probably rightly. Nevertheless, they may fairly say “us alone?” for, if we are, to be honest, almost everybody has a sense of the tribe, loyalty to their own tribe, and an ingrained inherited inability to accept other tribes as equals.

Few like to admit this, but few can honestly deny there is truth in it. Pakistanis may be as guilty of casual racism as the English, Scots, Welsh, Irish or Jews, as indeed is indicated by the nineteen-year-old Rafiq’s thoughtless exchange with another young cricketer from a Pakistani family in which a friend or acquaintance reluctant to stand his hand was described as behaving like a Jew.

Of course, he is rightly horrified now, but he might accept that some of the racism to which he was subjected was equally thoughtless and even without malice.

In this context, if you want to cast your eye over malice, read some of the readers’ posts in The Times, rejoicing that Rafiq has “lost the moral high ground”. Which to my mind he surely hasn’t.

Meanwhile, for Yorkshire, there is a repair job to be done. It will not be easy, if only because attitudes are ingrained and hard to get clear of.

An apology has already been made; it should be followed by a frank statement that any racism is “abhorrent”, to use a word carefully (would guess) chosen by Michael Atherton in “The Times” earlier this week. Then Yorkshire must build a bridge with the County’s large community whose families hail from the sub-continent of India and Pakistan. They should seek out promising young cricketers from the county’s sizeable cricket-loving community with Asian family roots, and make it clear they will be welcomed warmly, not treated with suspicion.

Finally let us be clear. Racism in cricket reflects racism in society, and though Britain is a far less racist country than it was half a century ago, and is indeed arguably freer than most of all but unconscious racism, it will take much longer to eradicate it.

This can’t be done until we admit that racism is as natural as deplorable and as natural as other undesirable or repulsive feelings.

To end on a lighter, even frivolous, note. Azeem Rafiq suggests that the Nottinghamshire batsman Alex Hales called his dog “Kevin” because it is black. I suggest he may have admiringly named his Dobermann after Kevin Pietersen, the devastating batsman who was, I think, still with Notts when the young Hales joined the club.