Gary Ballance with Azeem Rafiq following a Clydesdale Bank 40 match in August 2012. And yet six years on the motto “Clean Bowl Racism” had somehow failed to cleanse the organs of the national summer sport, to the extent that former Bradford North MP Terry Rooney spoke in parliament about “the deep-rooted embedded racism in Yorkshire County Cricket Club”. A year later the ECB drummed up its first Great Big Anti Racism Report, with Tim Lamb, Harrison’s predecessor as CEO, announcing that “complacency is not acceptable”. Ring any bells? Does it sound, for example, like the exact words used by people like John Holder, Michael Holding, Michael Carberry and Azeem Rafiq in the decades since? Shall we pick a date? How about June 1998 when 56 MPs led, gawd bless him, by the vigorous backbencher Jeremy Corbyn, put forward a parliamentary motion calling for action from the ECB over research that revealed “a culture of racial exclusion, racial stereotyping and … racial abuse of black and Asian cricket players”.

The ECB has been presented with this problem repeatedly. The story is that Yorkshire CCC is still institutionally racist. The news here is not that Yorkshire County Cricket Club, a huge portion of the ECB’s parish, alma mater to the current England head coach, captain and elite pathway coach, is institutionally racist.

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