Sportblog | The Guardian — Azeem Rafiq RSS



Azeem Rafiq’s courage shows Yorkshire and ECB what a real leader looks like | Barney Ronay

While Rafiq spoke with bravery and honesty about his pain, Tom Harrison offered only evasion and self-preservationIt seems that Yorkshire County Cricket Club were right about Azeem Rafiq all along. He really is a natural-born leader. Just not in the way they’d hoped.On Tuesday morning Rafiq sat for an hour and three quarters in the parliamentary committee room of the digital, culture, media and sport select committee. He spoke for most of that time, stopping occasionally to gather himself. In the process he delivered a devastating, fearlessly detailed description of institutional racism shared live and unedited with the British public. Continue reading...

Continue reading



Azeem Rafiq’s testimony exposes how power works in cricket – and in Britain | Jonathan Liew

The treatment of the former off-spinner shows how those with status bend the world to their whim without real consequencesIn 2016 Azeem Rafiq returned to Yorkshire, the club and the county where – as we now know – he had encountered racist abuse and ritual humiliation since he was a child. On Tuesday morning in parliament the Conservative MP Damian Green, who was sacked from the government in 2017 for lying about the discovery of pornography on his office computer in 2008, wanted to know why.Green was by no means the first person to pose this question. Since Rafiq first went public with his experiences last autumn he has been hounded on social media by members of the public demanding...

Continue reading