The key question that won’t go away in the Yorkshire CCC racism crisis - Chris Waters comment

The trigger was pulled by Lord Kamlesh Patel, the Yorkshire chairman, who summarily dismissed 16 members of staff in the wake of Azeem Rafiq’s allegations of racism at the club.

The bodies, figuratively speaking of course, are to be found among the lost careers and damaged reputations of those who were sacked, including the British Asian lead physiotherapist, Kunwar Bansil.

Bansil is ‘back from the dead’ and back in the game as the head of science and medicine at Notts; others, however, were not so lucky (one had to drive a supermarket lorry just to make ends meet, while mosthave suffered terribly with their health).

After another bruising week in this horrible saga, one which has had a devastating impact on everyone involved, a number of questions remain - chief among them, who ordered those ‘hits’ on the Yorkshire coaching and backroom staff in late 2021?

This question, which has lingered like a bad smell for over a year, is back in sharp focus again after Patel suggested in a recent interview with Eastern Eye that he was acting on ECB instructions to dispense with staff, something the ECB then declined to corroborate at the Cricket Discipline Commission hearings in London.

In a further twist last Wednesday, the Daily Mail reported that “multiple senior figures” at the ECB had dismissed as “ridiculous and utterly far-fetched” claims that the governing body had ordered the purge.

Something, therefore, doesn’t add up.

In that interview with Eastern Eye, Patel is quoted as revealing that he was initially “asked by the ECB to come and help and turn this disaster around”, and that he was “asked by the ECB to work with them to create a framework and an environment where we would prove to the world that we weren’t a racistinstitution”.

The first conclusion, therefore, is obvious - Patel was asked to go in by the ECB (in other words, he was the ECB’s appointment) and to work with them to show that the new Yorkshire were beyond reproach (i.e., Patel and the ECB were working hand in hand to achieve this).

Patel was appointed on November 5, 2021, and he also stated in that interview that “I was asked by the ECB to ensure some people who were there from the previous regime did not take part in that governance process. Very clear about that.”

In some quarters, this has been taken to mean (reinforced, no doubt, by Eastern Eye’s own boast in the article that “we can disclose that the ECB urged him to get rid of people”) that the ECB asked Patel to sack the 16.

But is that really the case?

What can be asserted only from Patel’s exact quotes (a video of the interview is also available) is that he was asked to ensure that some from the previous regime did not take part in the “governance process”.

By that, we can no doubt infer that Mark Arthur, the former chief executive, and perhaps Liz Neto, the former HR manager, who was running Yorkshire’s defence to Rafiq’s employment tribunal claim that was abruptly settled by Patel, were in or among the Patel/ECB firing line.

But does that mean that the ECB also asked Patel to dispense with the overwhelming majority of the staff, who were actually removed for signing a letter in support of Arthur and the previous governance, one which had famously accused Rafiq of being on “a one-man mission to bring down the club”?

With most staff leaving on December 3, 2021, by which time the ECB’s own investigation into matters at Yorkshire was well under way, the ECB’s conflict of interest in this case would be even more damning if that was so.

But there is nothing in Patel’s exact quotes to say that he was asked by the ECB to sack the 16 (14 of them signatories to the letter).

Clearly, Patel was asked to make some changes, and it is not difficult to imagine the huge uproar in the hysterical atmosphere of the time had one or two heads not rolled down Cardigan Road - viz. the ECB must surely have given him some initial guidance, as he himself claimed.

But as Patel also said in that Eastern Eye piece, referring again to the shared ambition with the ECB to “prove to the world that we (Yorkshire) weren’t a racist institution”... “I did all that”, the peer adding in palpable dismay at what he views as a betrayal by the governing body: “So when I’m attacked for things that I’ve been asked to do (I’ve been attacked from all quarters), where the ECB could have made a statement, could have come and supported, and when I sent letter after letter to them to say you asked me to do this, I’ve done it and now I need your support to support me and back me up on it, that wasn’t forthcoming.”

Or, to put it in simpler terms, Patel believes that he was given a specific mandate (to show that Yorkshire are not racist), achieved it in his eyes and then, amid the outcry that attended his ultimate efforts to prove this to the world (the mass sackings), the ECB stayed quiet while he copped all the flak - in other words, they allowed him to get on with his job only to not then publicly back how he did it.

Was Patel acting alone? Who knows…

He was in contact with Rafiq, who’d demanded nothing less than “a total clearout” in an interview with Sky News in reaction to the staff letter, saying he did not see how Patel could “leave one in there”.

Was Patel influenced by those around him who held such views?

The question as to who was responsible for ordering the hits will not go away.