Yorkshire CCC - Cricket Discipline Commission hearing is 'public' in name only - Chris Waters Comment

A public hearing in which those presiding can, at any point, disconnect that live stream in the interests of confidentiality.

A public hearing in which journalists are not allowed to receive copies of any written representations, submissions, evidence, transcripts or other documents submitted or created during the proceedings.

A public hearing, then, which threatens to be about as open and transparent as the dictatorship of Kim Jong-un, the supreme leader of North Korea.

Perhaps Jong-un is chairing events, although it seems that Tim O’Gorman, the former Derbyshire player, has that dubious honour, one for which the term “poisoned chalice” might have been coined.

To O’Gorman and a Cricket Discipline Commission panel that also comprises Mark Milliken-Smith KC and Dr Seema Patel falls the task of hearing the disciplinary proceedings brought by the England and Wales Cricket Board against Yorkshire and their former players Gary Ballance, John Blain, Tim Bresnan, Andrew Gale, Matthew Hoggard, Richard Pyrah and Michael Vaughan, following the racism allegations raised by their former team-mate Azeem Rafiq.

Yorkshire and Ballance have admitted to the charges against them and so are not appearing before the CDC, which sits from March 1-9 and purports to be independent of the ECB itself, while Blain, Bresnan, Gale, Hoggard and Pyrah have pulled out citing problems with the process/ECB investigation.

Given those problems (in a nutshell, the ECB is effectively the investigator, prosecutor and, fear many, the judge and jury in its own case, one in which key individuals have not been interviewed amid myriad flaws too many to mention), it is difficult to hold out much hope for any sort of clarity/justice as one of the grubbiest episodes in sporting history nears some sort of end-game.

From the outset it has felt as if the ECB has had too much at stake for it to be any different (after all, it suspended Yorkshire from hosting international cricket at the height of the furore pending reforms implemented by its own agent of change, the Yorkshire chairman Lord Kamlesh Patel, while Rafiq is the ECB’s own key witness against the club and the individuals concerned).

For the ECB to U-turn after what happened in late 2021, when the club was effectively destroyed and a great many lives and careers ruined, compromised from the outset its own investigation, which has not only taken much longer than the widely criticised previous one by the law firm Squire Patton Boggs at Yorkshire’s behest, but almost certainly been considerably less rigorous and impartial. There is also disquiet that Patel has simply admitted to the charges against the club.

Perhaps O’Gorman, Milliken-Smith and Patel (Seema) will surprise us and show that the CDC really is independent and has the skill/courage to deal with the case, but their hands are tied from the start. Effectively, they are ruling over an investigation which Bresnan rightly called “a circus” and Gale “a witch-hunt”. Other unflattering and justified terms are available.

Alas, the only way of ever getting to the truth would be a public inquiry that takes the matter out of the ECB’s hands and scrutinises its own activities too.

That will not happen because of the costs involved and the fact that the inquiry would have to be convened by a government minister, itself unlikely given the egregious conduct of the DCMS Select Committee (Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport), which, as this newspaper proved, suppressed key findings from the initial investigation.