Michael Carberry’s striking comments a timely reminder on racism in game

The comments by Terry Rooney, the then Labour MP for Bradford North, sent shockwaves through a club that described his words as “incredibly hurtful and totally without foundation”.

Rooney told the Commons: “Virtually every Test player from Yorkshire started in the Bradford League. About 60 per cent of cricketers in the Bradford League are from the Indian subcontinent. Not one of them, despite their skills and abilities, has ever been adopted by the Yorkshire County Cricket Club, even at trainee level.”

Since then, Yorkshire CCC has worked hard to eradicate any lingering perceptions in that regard, justified or otherwise.

In that same year of 2004, wicketkeeper Ismail Dawood and pace bowler Ajmal Shahzad represented the Yorkshire first XI, and there have since been many players of Asian/West Indian extraction to have played for the club including Adil Rashid, Moin Ashraf and Azeem Rafiq plus overseas stars such as Younus Khan, Kraigg Brathwaite and Nicholas Pooran.

Rooney’s comments returned to mind following the ones last week by Michael Carberry, the former England batsman, who alleged that “cricket is rife with racism” and that “the people running the game don’t care about black people”.

It was a striking claim, particularly given the seemingly diverse nature of cricket today, and yet you can pretty much count the number of black county cricketers/coaches on one hand plus those holding key administrative posts.

In fact, the number of black county cricketers has fallen by an estimated 75 per cent since the early 1990s, and it would be a naive person who did not think that some form of bias – unconscious or otherwise – comes into play in all walks of life when it comes to receiving CV applications from those of ethnic backgrounds.

Although it seems astonishing – not to mention profoundly depressing – that we are still talking about issues of race in the 21st century (not just talking about them, in fact, but having to waste our time doing so because some people still cannot grasp the fact that everyone is equal), such issues are not going away any time soon as evidenced by the Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in Minnesota.

Perhaps the most striking thing about Carberry’s claims, indeed, is that they appear, to a white man such as myself who covers the sport, extremely strong and not outwardly obvious.

As someone at the sharp end, though, it is vital that Carberry’s opinions are listened to and treated with the utmost seriousness.

He further claimed that he was pushed out of one of his former counties by calling out racist behaviour by one of his coaches, while Jason Holder, the West Indies captain, stated last week that he would be “foolish to say that racism is not prevalent in sport… it is”.

Given Carberry’s remarks and the criticism of Yorkshire in parliament 16 years ago, I asked Martyn Moxon, Yorkshire’s director of cricket, whether he has experienced racism in the game.

He said that he hadn’t and that his only experience of any racism was in apartheid South Africa in the early 1980s, when he briefly represented Griqualand West.

“It was eye-opening for me, a young lad from Barnsley, who’d kind of heard about apartheid but to actually witness it was eye-opening to say the least,” he recalled.

“It kind of informed me of what it was like and educated me, I suppose.

“But I’ve certainly not been involved in any dressing room or any club that’s had any dealings with racism whatsoever, and I condemn racism in any form.

“Maybe I’ve been lucky, and Carbs is obviously a black man and I don’t know what he’s had to suffer, and we have to listen to what people like Carbs are saying about this subject.”

Moxon is rightly proud of Yorkshire’s cricketing diversity.

On his watch, many players of Asian extraction, particularly, have played for the club and advanced the cause of equality by being splendid role models as well as splendid cricketers.

But as Carberry’s words and the distressing events in Minnesota prove, prejudice is either not far from the surface in this world or else making its presence felt in full public glare.

We must never kid ourselves, certainly those white people among us, that all is sweetness and light in another man’s shoes and that the cancer of racism - even if not always clear to us - has completely gone away.

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