Yorkshire should face no further sanctions in Azeem Rafiq racism saga - Chris Waters comment

Amid suggestions that the club could be hit by sanctions across all three domestic tournaments, and/or fined, one can only sympathise with the players and coaches whose work could be undone at any point.

The Cricket Discipline Commission (CDC) is set to deliver its various verdicts by the end of the month, but sanction hearings might not take place until late May as this interminable process (over two-and-a-half years and counting) inches towards some sort of inevitably unsatisfactory end-game.

Yorkshire, of course, have admitted to four amended charges so unless the CDC dramatically decides that their guilty pleas are suspect (and I would argue that all of them are open to serious question), it remains only to determine what punishment will be heaped upon punishment for a club utterly devastated by events.

Apart from playing to the gallery on social media, or sending a message which has already been sent and thoroughly assimilated, it is hard to see what purpose any kind of points penalty/fine would serve considering that the organisation has been brought to despair on-and-off the field – unless the ambition is actually to hasten it out of business entirely.

Clearly, a CDC unlikely to overturn guilty pleas will almost certainly want to look like it is doing something, not least as you can already hear the outcry about how Durham were infamously hammered for lesser offences. But it would be like pumping more bullets into a corpse and the wrong thing to do to the new Yorkshire set-up, meaning that any sanctions, in this judgement, should be waived at best and suspended at worst.

Back to those four amended charges to which Yorkshire have pleaded guilty, pleas overseen by outgoing chairman Lord Kamlesh Patel, who was specifically put in place by the England and Wales Cricket Board to implement change.

None of the charges, as far as I can see, has had appropriate scrutiny applied to its contents.

First, the charge that Yorkshire “mishandled” the initial Squire Patton Boggs investigation into Azeem Rafiq’s allegations on the basis of a letter sent by the former chairman Roger Hutton to the ECB which rejected the investigation’s upheld findings.

Well, that would have to be the same Roger Hutton who had earlier publicly apologised to Rafiq and said there was no question he was “a victim of racial harassment and bullying”.

So did Yorkshire mishandle the investigation or did they mishandle the apology? A moot point, especially considering that no one would dispute that the investigation itself was deeply flawed.

The second part of that charge was that Yorkshire said they would take no disciplinary action in response to the findings, but they did in fact take action against Gary Ballance, the only staff member found guilty of using racist language, something he freely admitted in the context of former close friends trading insults socially. Ballance was warned as to his future conduct before the club gave him a new contract, and a training need was identified.

The second charge, concerning the alleged mass deletion of emails and/or documents prior to Patel’s arrival in 2021, has already been shown to be dubious. Yorkshire have changed their story/timeline in response to media reports and given no details as to what was actually destroyed. It is a charge which strongly implies a huge cover-up but for which no evidence has been produced.

Charge three, that Yorkshire failed to take adequate action on complaints by Rafiq, has still not been satisfactorily proved either, while the previous regime rejected claims that the club failed to take adequate action on complaints of racism by spectators at home games. Indeed, an example cited of a fixture at Scarborough in 2018 overlooks the not inconsiderable detail that the police and the ECB investigated at the time and the matter was closed. Further, the ECB investigation that preceded the CDC hearings did not interview key personnel at Scarborough in respect of that example.

Finally, the charge that Yorkshire “failed to address systemic use of racist or discriminatory language over a long period by employees or players at the club” has been admitted on what grounds? Matthew Hoggard, against whom the most serious allegations are levied remember, reportedly told the ECB that the P-word was “widely used” in the dressing room during his time at the club, but that claim is disputed by contemporaries.

Hoggard, incidentally, last played for Yorkshire in 2009. And as Damocles stands, sword at the ready, it is worth remembering that it was the 2021 regime that was deposed.