Michael Vaughan and legal team deserve chance to cross-examine Adil Rashid face to face - Chris Waters comment

This allegation is extremely serious; so much so, it threatens to wreck your career and reputation.

You vehemently deny the allegation but, pending the outcome of a disciplinary process, you are firstly suspended by your current employer and then, when you do return to work as that process continues, are effectively forced to stand down again of your own accord due to internal complaints arising from your reinstatement.

Some people, in a nutshell, are just not happy about the fact that you are back working again before that process has actually finished – and, well, there is the “brand” to consider.

Yet that process – itself part of a wider process involving several other former colleagues of yours facing similar accusations – has been dragging on for months with no end in sight.

And so you exist in this wretched state of limbo – unable to get on with your life and career on the one hand; unable to fight to clear your name on the other.

And all the while the effect on you and your family is stark; financially, you have also taken a significant hit in terms of lost earning revenue and the legal costs involved.

Now if this happened to you, as it has happened to Michael Vaughan, the former Yorkshire batsman who stands accused of telling a group of Asian players before a T20 game in 2009, “there’s too many of you lot, we need to do something about it”, his BBC career on hold, his character in question, you would want that disciplinary process to be entirely beyond reproach.

You would want every chance to properly test the evidence against you and for your legal representatives to be utterly unconstrained in their efforts to defend you.

Assuming, for these purposes, the seemingly quaint notion nowadays that a person is innocent until proven guilty, you would surely want all of these things for anyone in society, anyone who found themselves in a similar position.

For, make no mistake, anyone really could find themselves in the position that Vaughan is in today – you don’t need a high profile or to be a former England cricket captain for a serious, historic accusation to land suddenly at your door.

So why is it, having established that base concept of fairness and transparency and the severity of the charge in this particular case, the validity of which is actually immaterial, that the England and Wales Cricket Board has been resisting efforts to ensure that one of the key witnesses is physically present at the public hearing that will consider Vaughan’s case?

Why, remarkably, Vaughan has even had to offer to dig into his own pocket to pay for Adil Rashid to nip back briefly from Bangladesh, where he will be on tour with England in yet another ten-a-penny white-ball series, so that the England spinner can be properly, unrestrictedly cross-examined, face-to-face, as opposed to remotely some thousands of miles away on a perhaps dodgy internet connection.

Rashid, the Yorkshire and England leg-spinner, famously corroborated Azeem Rafiq’s “you lot” allegation in a statement just one day before the first DCMS hearing in November 2021.

Among the questions that Vaughan and his representatives will quite reasonably want to probe is why Rashid backed up the allegation at that specific time, after more than a year of silence on the subject, as well as suggestions made by another of the Yorkshire players present on the day in question in 2009, Ajmal Shahzad, that Rashid was “pressurised” into corroboration.

That is what Shahzad told ECB investigators in December 2021, while simultaneously vouching utterly for Vaughan’s character and denying that Vaughan made the remark.

Furthermore, another Yorkshire staff member gave similar evidence to ECB investigators; this stuff is central, therefore, to Vaughan’s case.

The ECB, though, has said that it would be “disproportionately expensive” for Rashid to return to England (a problem seemingly avoided by Vaughan’s offer to pay for the flight), and a curious attitude considering the governing body’s propensity for throwing good money after bad (The Hundred anyone?).

No, it is another example of the chronic failure of due process that has characterised the scandal from start to… well, one had better not say “finish” because will this ever

end?

However, in the interests of taking the scandal seriously, the very real impact it has had and continues to have on numerous people, and simply out of respect for one of our great sporting figures in Michael Vaughan, it is imperative that key witnesses are physically present at the hearing.

I would want that if I was in his shoes; who wouldn’t...