Azeem Rafiq affair: DCMS hearing must be transparent and fair to both Yorkshire CCC and Rafiq

Firstly to Rafiq, who had seven of his 43 allegations upheld by an independent investigation that deemed that there were three separate incidents of racist language used by former Yorkshire players before 2010 and, prior to 2012, that a former Yorkshire coach regularly used racist language.

Skeletons in closets have an uncanny knack of rattling back to life and it seems that the details will finally be brought into the public domain, subject to the scrutiny of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) committee protected by parliamentary privilege.

Secondly, it must also be fair to Yorkshire, against whom 36 of the 43 allegations were not upheld, including the key one that they are an institutionally racist organisation and that they released Rafiq from his contract in 2018 for racial as opposed to cricketing reasons.

The club’s astonishingly bad handling of the business, not so much a model of crisis management as of crisis mismanagement, with sponsors pulling out left, right and centre, an indefinite suspension from international cricket and the edifice crumbling brick-by-brick, should not be allowed to obscure the truth or otherwise of the actual allegations.

There are two separate issues here: Yorkshire’s handling of the affair – already demonstrably proven to be utterly abject – and then the nuts and bolts of it. That distinction must be kept in mind amid the fervent public mood.

Also in the interests of fairness, not only to Rafiq and to Yorkshire but to cricket in general, the hearing itself must be – and be seen to be – beyond reproach.

For that reason, it is not acceptable that the DCMS chair, Julian Knight MP, has already nailed his colours to the mast by accusing Yorkshire of “endemic racism” before they have given their evidence and stating that “this is one of the most repellent and disturbing episodes in modern cricket history”. That being so, how can Yorkshire hope for a fair hearing?

Knight must stand down on this one having appeared to prejudice the proceedings in a similar miscalculation to that made by Roger Hutton, the Yorkshire chairman, who invited comparable accusations relating to the independent investigation when he enlisted one of his former employers – the international law firm Squire Patton Boggs – to run it.

Transparency, openness, honesty, fairness… those must be the boundary markers before a ball has been bowled, qualities that have been distinctly lacking since this crisis commenced.

It is also important that the championing of the broader cause, as it were, the absolute and irrefutable fact that racism is abhorrent and should be struck out, called out and removed from society, does not come at the expense of the facts in this case.

That is a separate issue albeit one clearly interwoven; in other words, this should not be about advancing the moral cause per se but about getting to the bottom of the claims and counterclaims.

The very fact that this debate is happening and indeed has been happening in and around cricket in recent months is, perhaps, the only good thing to have come out of it so far and will hopefully lead to lasting change. If nothing else, let us all hope for that.

This is an incredibly complex, sensitive case, with so many questions and points to consider. Many have written, spoken and acted without any real knowledge of the claimant, the club and the complexities at hand; the full report from the investigation has still to be published.

Ultimately, the only people who really know what happened and the truth of everything are the people who were involved and can talk from experience. The rest of us – perhaps with some knowledge of various things, perhaps not – can only perceive, cogitate and hope for true clarity.

At that DCMS hearing on Tuesday week, with Rafiq set to attend along with Yorkshire officials, cricket must take the road to transparency.

It has been an ugly few months and it may soon get uglier; there is nothing attractive, after all, about racism.