Just another day and just more evidence of the men in suits watching each other’s backs.
You might have expected on Thursday the sports minister to have pointed out ECB chief executive Tom Harrison’s failure to grasp the racism crisis at the heart of the sport.
Instead, when Nigel Huddleston sat before MPs to give his thoughts, he would not desist from calling him ‘Tom’. More depressing proof of the chumminess of a sporting world incapable of taking a long hard look at itself.
Tom Harrison is under pressure to quit from his role as ECB CEO amid cricket's racism scandal
Nigel Huddleston (above) calling Harrison 'Tom' in front of MPs shows the chumminess of the sporting world
‘Tom’ — who will meet the county chairmen at the Oval on Friday with his back against the wall — is the man whose own appearance before MPs a few days ago was almost as abysmal as the battery of racist conduct that Azeem Rafiq and others have spoken about in painful detail this week.
You flinched to hear about Matthew Hoggard calling Rafiq ‘Raffa the Kaffir’ and Rafiq thinking it was just a shortening of his name until he looked up the word ‘kaffir’ — an insulting term for a black African. Hoggard’s apology to Rafiq cannot begin to obscure what a disgrace he was.
But this abuse came from intellectually challenged individuals seemingly incapable of anything better. ‘Tom’ is a man who is due a share of a £2.1million bonus paid out to ECB directors in the year he laid off 60 staff.
Yet when a sense of the discrimination Rafiq was up against came to light — and that player was courageous enough to call it out — ‘Tom’ was not impressive.
Just a little rigour would have told him that Yorkshire had previous, here. The 2014 Fletcher report into racism at Headingley told us all about it. There was also Bradford North’s former Labour MP Terry Rooney’s declaration back in 2006 that there was ‘deep-rooted racism’ at the club.
The club’s then chairman, Robin Smith, was so scandalised by Rooney that he demanded an apology and said that the claim would have been ‘actionable’ if said outside of parliament.
Matthew Hoggard (above) apologised to Azeem Rafiq for calling him ‘Raffa the Kaffir’
But ‘Tom’ didn’t delve into any of that. He was happy to let Yorkshire mount their own investigation into Rafiq’s claims and didn’t have any curiosity about how that investigation might be set up.
No problems for him when Yorkshire chummily appointed the law firm Squire Patton Boggs, a previous employer of Yorkshire’s then chairman Roger Hutton, to undertake the inquiry.
No problems when the county quietly decided to shelve the part of the investigation which would ask whether there was a culture of ‘institutional racism’ at Headingley, despite having initially agreed to do so in meetings with Rafiq’s lawyers.
Harrison’s contorted justification of these failings, when he appeared before MPs on Tuesday, was drowning in
