To the ruddy-faced fans who pack its beery stands each summer, Headingley is the beating heart of English cricket.
The home of Yorkshire for most of its 158 years, the place is steeped in sporting folklore: The scene of Stokes and Botham's Ashes, stomping ground of Boycott, Trueman and Illingworth, and home to more Test players (and county champions) than anywhere else in the land.
Yet next summer, our national side is set to give this corner of Leeds a wide berth.
There will, as things stand, be no Test match or one-day internationals played in white rose country. The final stages of major domestic tournaments will no longer be settled by bowlers roaring in from the Kirkstall Lane end. And the Emerald Stand, where rowdy supporters wear fancy dress, may no longer even be called the Emerald Stand.
To blame is a toxic dispute which has thrown England's most successful and iconic county side into chaos. Recent days have seen Yorkshire ostracised by cricket's establishment, attacked by commentators, pundits and thousands of fans, and dropped by sponsors (including Tetley brewery, Nike, Yorkshire Tea and Emerald Publishing, which has 'naming rights' to the aforementioned stand).
The club has been banned from staging major matches by the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB), the British game's governing body, while its culture and values were dubbed 'repellent and disturbing' by senior politicians.
The club has been banned from staging major matches by the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB), the British game's governing body, while its culture and values were dubbed 'repellent and disturbing' by senior politicians. Also in the firing line is former England batsman Gary Ballance (pictured), a serving Yorkshire player. He's said to have told colleagues in the mid-2000s: 'Don't talk to him (Rafiq), he's a P***,' and to have asked Rafiq when he saw bearded Asian men: 'Is that your uncle?'
At the centre of the public outrage are claims that a former player, Azeem Rafiq, and several Asian colleagues suffered serious – and, they say, institutional – racist abuse during their recent careers at the club.
The long and ugly catalogue of allegations range from being called 'P***s,' 'elephant washers' and 'sheikhs' by team-mates and coaches, to being told they 'stink' and should 'go back to where they came from' on a daily basis, to finding themselves the subject of off-colour jokes.
One Muslim player complained of being made to feel uncomfortable about the laddish drinking culture at the club. A second claimed he overheard two 'senior players' – both still involved at Yorkshire – talking about 'how they 'sh***ed a bird' in a hotel room who was on her period and made a mess, and all they could find was a Muslim player's prayer mat to clean it up'. And so on.
Among at least 12 players (as well as assorted members of staff) alleged to be the subject of complaints are former England captain Michael Vaughan, who is accused by Rafiq of telling a trio of Asian players, as they walked onto the pitch in 2009, 'there's too many of you lot; we need to do something about it'.
Vaughan 'categorically denies' making the remark, and describes reading the allegation that he made it as like being struck over the head with a brick.
Also in the firing line is former England batsman Gary Ballance, a serving Yorkshire player. He's said to have told colleagues in the mid-2000s: 'Don't talk to him (Rafiq), he's a P***,' and to have asked Rafiq when he saw bearded Asian men: 'Is that your uncle?'
Azeem Rafiq suffered serious – and, they say, institutional – racist abuse during his recent career at the club
Ballance, 31, has admitted making the comments, and issued an extended apology for them this week in which he stressed they were made in the context of a close friendship with the player, who was 'my closest friend in cricket'.
He added: 'I deeply regret some of the language I used in my younger years.'
Most damaging of all, however, are claims about Yorkshire's handling of complaints.
Senior club officials appear to have dismissed racist incidents as 'banter' and sought to sweep them under the carpet. Not one person has been sacked or even disciplined (though an apologetic club chairman Roger Hutton and two board members bowed to the inevitable and resigned yesterday).
In what looks very much like an attempted cover-up, the club has fought tooth-and-nail to keep damning findings of a report into the scandal secret.
In other words, say critics, the behaviour of players, staff, fans, executives and board members of England's most iconic county cricket club, which has produced a virtual assembly line of famous Test players, has for much of the past 20 years been institutionally racist.
Or as Tom Harrison, the ECB's chief executive, said yesterday, the club's actions are 'leading the game into serious disrepute'.
Adil Rashid (pictured)In other words, say critics, the behaviour of players, staff, fans, executives and board members of England's most iconic county cricket club, which has produced a virtual assembly line of famous Test players, has for much of the past 20 years been institutionally racist
The charge is all the more tricky given Yorkshire's chequered history. For despite being one of the most multicultural parts of the country, taking in Bradford, Dewsbury and Batley, both the stands and the changing rooms at Headingley have for years been, as the saying goes, hideously white.
Until 1992, you had to be born in Yorkshire to play for the county, rendering it a sort of closed shop in which not a single Asian player was ever selected. And despite cricket's massive popularity among immigrant communities, local leagues were often segregated, with Indians and Pakistanis made to feel so unwelcome by established teams that they started their own clubs.
The summer that outsiders were allowed into the team, a member of the crowd at Headingley wore a pig's head to a Test between England and Pakistan, in what was widely seen to be an anti-Muslim gesture. He was not disciplined.
And the first Asian player to be allowed to represent the side was an overseas import rather than a local star: Indian legend Sachin Tendulkar, who had been born 4,350 miles away.
Despite the pool of minority talent on its doorstep, Yorkshire did not actually select a British Asian for another decade: It signed Dewsbury's Ismail Dawood in 2003. The same year, the club refused to discipline one of its white players, Australian Darren Lehmann, for calling a Sri Lankan opponent a 'black c**t' during a one-day international. The county's then chairman, Colin Graves, responded by telling reporters: 'You can't say it was malicious, far from it. He is not a racist.'
In 2004, Terry Rooney, a Labour MP, told the Commons of 'deep-rooted, embedded racism in Yorkshire County Cricket Club'. In response, Graves's successor, Robin Smith, wrote to him indignantly demanding an apology, claiming the allegations were 'incredibly hurtful and totally without foundation'.
By THEN – and this, remember, is just 17 years ago – the colour barrier at Yorkshire was at least starting to be broken, with the emergence of two talented Asian players from its own academy system: Ajmal Shahzad, a bowler who went on to be capped for England, and Adil Rashid, who is currently representing the national side at the
