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Azeem Rafiq has called on sponsors to leave the club
if Colin Graves is reappointed as Yorkshire chair, and he has questioned the
probable return of Graves to that role.
Rafiq, who last year in the County Championship saw
the club fined £400,000 and docked 48 points, along with sanctions against six
players, for speaking out against racism he experienced as a Yorkshire player,
expressed in a Sunday newspaper column that he felt that “nothing had
changed” in the 40 months since he first brought up the matter and that
“all we have are empty words and broken promises.”
After serving as chair between 2012 and 2015, when the
club agreed to an ECB allegation of neglecting to address the pervasive use of
racist or discriminatory language, Graves has apparently been in negotiations
with Yorkshire about a comeback. When Graves characterised the accusations of
racism as “banter” in a TV broadcast in June, it caused controversy.
Graves claimed that the accusations had never been brought up with him. He also
declined to testify as a witness in November 2021 at the parliamentary hearings
that followed Rafiq’s complaints.
“Maybe there is still time to act, still time to
show some backbone, but it’s running out fast,” Rafiq wrote in the
Observer.
“I cast my mind back to November 2021, when under
intense political pressure the England and Wales Cricket Board suspended
Yorkshire from hosting international cricket because of its slow and
substandard response to my testimony. In the hours that followed dozens of
companies ended their associations with the club.
“My question now is for Yorkshire’s current
sponsors… Does Colin Graves reflect your values? Is it acceptable to describe
racism as banter?
“Sponsors found their moral compass before, and
they need to find it again, because any organisation supporting this is
complicit in it. There is still time for them to act, to leave now and stop
Yorkshire stepping back in time and undoing what progress they have made in the
past three years.”