Opinion – Marina Izidro: Racism accusation in cricket club turns scandal in England

I don’t know if you know or understand cricket. I have lived in England for years and I confess that I have never found it so interesting. But this story goes beyond the sport, which is one of the most popular in the country, alongside football and rugby. It’s about how an athlete’s courage revealed a scandal that even involved the British parliament and how sponsors and public opinion increasingly dictate the rules of the game when institutions fall silent.

The Yorkshire County Cricket Club is one of the most traditional in England. Founded in 1863, it is a Manchester United or Liverpool of cricket. Club players defended or are in the English team. In the county of Yorkshire, almost 90% of the population is white. The sport is popular in nations such as India and Pakistan and attracts young people of Asian descent.

Azeem Rafiq was one of them. Now 30 years old, he moved from Pakistan to England at the age of 10. He played professionally in Yorkshire from 2008 to 2018, was captain of the under-19 team and national team. Only after early retirement did he have the strength to tell what he had lived through.

Last year, he spoke for the first time to a journalist about what he called institutional racism that nearly drove him to suicide. During his career, he suffered discrimination from coaches and players, came back from training crying. Whoever knew didn’t do anything. They said it was a joke.

After the report, the club even opened an investigation, but it ended a year later with an apology and no one punished. Better to leave it as it was. The press insisted. He had access to parts of the report in which Rafiq said he had been nicknamed “paki”, a prejudiced term referring to those who were born in Pakistan; that players told him to sit away from the group, “near the bathroom”; that one of them had a black dog named Kevin and called it non-white athletes.

The reaction was immediate. Public opinion sided with him, and within a few days ten sponsors left the club. The British government began to investigate. Just then the governing body of the sport, the England and Wales Cricket Board, banned Yorkshire from playing international matches — another financial blow — and the club’s president and chief executive resigned.

This week, Rafiq spoke at the British Parliament in a statement broadcast on national TV. Shaken, he told of episodes of racism, the “inhuman” treatment he received when his pregnant wife lost the baby, how he felt isolated and humiliated. For the deputy responsible for the inquiry, it is one of the most disturbing episodes in the modern history of cricket.

In the 1980s, David Lawrence, a black English player, saw a fellow club member leave a banana peel on the door of the hotel room where he was staying before a game. I was 17 years old. Talented, he made it to the national team. With no one to ask for help, he suffered in silence.

Today, if clubs try to stifle something wrong, sponsors and society have the power to say that they do not tolerate the intolerable.

The hotline created this month by an independent commission to hear cases of racism has already received more than a thousand calls. If Yorkshire had acted, the end could have been different. Now that’s left with a destroyed reputation and a huge financial loss. Having the courage to share his story, Rafiq wanted to be “the voice of the voiceless.” How the club must regret not having heard.