14 September 2023 , 08:37
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Even now, six years on, Azeem Rafiq says he is still being contacted by cricketers in dressing rooms suffering in silence.
“I had a couple of calls last year where Ramadan was mocked,” he said. “This year in June, on the day of the release of the Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket report, someone contacted us - a current player - saying he’d been reading it and that his teammates were around him, discrediting it and undermining it.
“In the last week I’ve been told about an Asian player being described by a team-mate as **** and being told that ‘everyone knows why you’re getting lots of opportunities.’ And I’ve also been told about another player who has a reputation for offensive language, who refused to play against a South Asian academy and belittled runs scored by other players against them, calling the team a ‘sack of s***’.
“People have rung me - not just players, administrators as well - but they are too scared to come forward publicly and I don't blame them.” The idea that cricket can draw a line under its racism and discrimination issues after Yorkshire’s £400,000 fine and 48-point deduction in July remains a fantasy.
Rafiq’s harrowing experience after raising his head above the parapet explains why. It also underlines why so many athletes, far beyond cricket, still keep their concerns to themselves. When he laid bare the extent of the sport’s toxic culture to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport in 2021, dozens more Asian or Black players were initially right behind him. His nightmare ever since has sent them back into isolation.
Ex-England stars pull out of Rafiq racism inquiry and slam "failed" ECB process
“We were told that there is a group of around 50 players ready to speak about their experiences,” he exclusively told the Mirror. “There was no way the system at that point could have handled that. Most people knew that I was not going to be scared off or bought off. So how do you push other people back and stop more experiences coming into the public domain? “Attack me. So that's what they did.”
Initially ignored by Yorkshire, the club he’d once captained, 32-year-old Rafiq was vindicated by former chairman Roger Hutton who admitted institutionalised racism had been an issue there. It still led to Rafiq receiving threats and abuse, online and to his face. Worse still, according to written testimony submitted to a parliamentary inquiry, one thug circled his house in Barnsley, late at night, before defecating in his garden.
Azeem Rafiq has provided examples of the issues still in cricketAnother stalked his property carrying what appeared to be a weapon. Rafiq later revealed he’d had to recruit "24/7 security”. All because he’d gone up against the establishment to expose the rotten culture at an institution. His critics revelled in the unearthing of historic, anti-semitic social media posts from 2011 he’d made and been rightly vilified for - even though he’d received understanding from the Jewish community.
It handed them their opportunity to paint a flawed man in the worst light. The empire struck back. But the ICEC report earlier this year made clear that “the evidence is unequivocal: racism is a serious issue in cricket.” Also that, in the sport’s most senior leadership, South Asian representation is limited to just 2.8 per cent despite that demographic making up 26-29 per cent of the game’s adult recreational population and 6.9 per cent of the population of England and Wales.
Worse still, the report revealed cricket had seen a decline “in Black British male professional players of around 75 per cent”. Rafiq has dismissed the idea that things will change with more Black and Brown faces in senior positions - unless, like Commission chair Cindy Butts, they are prepared to call the shocking state of play as they see it.
“Representation is important,” he went on. “But on its own, it's not the only solution. It’s a quick fix. The way that people behind the scenes are trying to get at people who supported me is just a reflection of the fact that cricket is not prepared to accept reality. I've heard so many people say: ‘We just need to move on.’ “When a person of colour says it, other people are empowered to say: ‘Well, he's not saying anything, so why are you?’ But we do need to deal with stuff before we move forward. You don’t just move on.”