View
comments
Perhaps the select committee of MPs thought the sharp-suited, highly remunerated boss of English cricket had already damaged himself enough, with his half-baked attempt to explain why his organisation lacked the inclination to investigate Yorkshire cricket.
It is certainly hard to find another reason why Tom Harrison has escaped scot-free in today’s report into racism and cricket.
Harrison, we should remember, is the one who led the ECB delegation which tried to sell the committee an absurdly convoluted explanation as to why his organisation had not investigated — nor even enquired about — Azeem Rafiq’s allegations of racism. The ECB feared their independence would be damaged if Yorkshire’s own inquiry proved so abysmal that they had to launch their own. You really could not make it up.
The glaring institutional failings at Yorkshire were there in black and white all along, for any sports administrator with a modicum of intellectual curiosity to see.
Rafiq told my colleague Paul Newman in an interview last April that he had heard nothing from the county cricket club, six months on from the conclusion of the so-called ‘independent inquiry’ into racism. The ensuing piece alone was a tough and vivid read, loaded with the air of desperation that could and should have told Harrison that he and his people had to deal with this. He didn’t.
ECB chief executive Tom Harrison escaped scot-free from a report into racism in cricket
Other journalistic pieces of a similar nature didn’t see the light of day. Reporters who picked around the edges of Rafiq’s story last year and took their findings to Headingley recall veiled threats of legal action if they dared to publish.
By failing to see and tackle Yorkshire’s
