Patel should apologise publicly to the Yorkshire staff he has sacked and then clear his desk - Chris Waters

So said Yorkshire in a statement which confirmed that the club has now settled with Andrew Gale, its former head coach, and Rich Pyrah, its former bowling coach - in other words, that it has paid them off.

By my calculation, that is now 10 former employees who have been paid off one way or another, the others being chief executive Mark Arthur; director of cricket Martyn Moxon; batting coach Paul Grayson; second team coach Ian Dews; academy director Richard Damms; strength and conditioning coach Ian Fisher; fitness coach Pete Sim and HR manager Liz Neto, all at a cost running well into seven figures.

In seven of those cases the “crime” was that they signed a letter to the previous board criticising its handling of, and response to, the racism crisis and questioning the motives/character of complainant Azeem Rafiq.

Arthur and Moxon did not sign the letter as it was also an attempt by loyal staff to defend them from what were widely considered - indeed, I would say unanimously so from within the club itself - to be wildly exaggerated and/or false accusations, with the former chairman Roger Hutton leading the club’s response as both Arthur and Moxon were implicated.

Neto did not sign the letter as she was not a member of the coaching/medical staff, although I can state from my own knowledge that pretty much every staff member at Yorkshire CCC would have signed the letter had they known about it and/or been asked to do so - a case of there but for the grace of God go an awful lot of people, including the players.

All of which leaves only Wayne Morton, the former head of sports science and medicine, and the staff under him who were subcontracted to Yorkshire, as the outstanding legal cases arising from the mass sackings implemented by incoming chairman Lord Kamlesh Patel. Fourteen people signed the letter, which was written in the manner of a respectful grievance and marked ‘private and confidential’.

Since last December, when Patel pulled the trigger like a crazed cowboy from the Wild West, leaving the sacked staff and their families bereft before Christmas, many people have seemed perfectly happy to accept this appalling state of affairs - not least members of my own profession, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, the England and Wales Cricket Board, and so on.

However, the narrative changed with the brave intervention of one of those sacked staff, Kunwar Bansil, who told his story to Mike Atherton in The Times. Bansil, who went everywhere with the players, said that he was never aware of any racism and that the picture painted of the deposed regime was utterly false.

It is a sad but undeniable fact that had Kunwar Bansil’s name been ‘Kevin Benson’, say, he would have been instantly ridiculed and branded a racist.

Fortunately, the former lead physiotherapist - now at Notts - is a British Asian and a highly intelligent, respected and likeable man. And as a British Asian who was actually an eyewitness, who is to say that his testimony is not just as significant and deserving of attention?

Another sacked staff member - also a man of great courage - then told his story to me on the back of Bansil’s interview. Dr Mark Nesti, a psychologist of some repute, who has worked at Liverpool John Moores University, with a number of Premier League football clubs and authored a number of books, described Rafiq’s allegations as “laughable” and claimed that the former player had deliberately tried to “destroy the club or certainly wreck it”.

In addition, extracts from the independent investigation conducted into Rafiq’s allegations by the law firm Squire Patton Boggs, whose report was never published, were revealed by The Yorkshire Post to contain such details as the fact that Rafiq did not lose his career to racism after all (the DCMS simply allowed that one to pass), along with accusations that Rafiq himself used racially-insensitive language in addition to his already admitted antisemitism.

What is this? It is certainly not justice.

Oh that Patel, the worst chairman in the club’s history, had been true to his word in November when he said that he wanted to get to the bottom of what had happened and to take everyone on a journey to make Yorkshire, in his words, “the greatest cricket club in the world”.

Sadly, it is no longer the greatest cricket club even in Yorkshire anymore and never will be until Patel finds the decency to apologise publicly to the staff he has sacked, and for the careers he has ruined without anything like properly tested evidence, before clearing his desk.