Three years on from my interview with Azeem Rafiq, it’s surreal to see where we and the game have ended upAzeem Rafiq sat well outside cricket’s consciousness in July 2020. It had been nearly two years since Yorkshire had let him go for a second time and it took an interview with the Professional Cricketers’ Association, published on their website and probably read by a handful of people, to bring him back into my mind. The subject was a new business Rafiq had opened with his family, a tea shop in Rotherham. While mapping a future outside cricket, he still had ambitions to keep playing.I arranged an interview with Rafiq because I wanted to know how a once trailblazing Yorkshire...
Since the triumphs of his playing career, the Ashes-winning captain has struggled to find a meaningful niche in cricketI keep a photograph by my desk of England’s victory lap of the Oval after the last day of the 2005 Ashes. The friend who took it was drunk, so the outfield lists like the deck of a ship. It was shot on one of those disposable plastic cameras, but you can still pick out the players making their way around the boundary.There’s Andrew Flintoff, one arm above his head, Marcus Trescothick, holding the little crystal replica of the urn, Steve Harmison, one hand throttling a bottle of champagne, and Michael Vaughan, dapper despite his tired whites. He has an England flag...
Every day of silence on Azeem Rafiq’s experience was a missed chance to tackle a problem that has blighted English cricketOn Saturday morning the BBC broadcast an interview with the former England captain Michael Vaughan about accusations of racism, that he has repeatedly denied, made against him by his former teammate Azeem Rafiq. If it was a deeply uncomfortable experience for Vaughan, who has been dropped from the Test Match Special team covering the forthcoming Ashes, then he was at least optimistic. “How we move on from this situation is the key,” Vaughan argued with regards to the Yorkshire scandal exposed by Rafiq. “I firmly believe that it’s education, honest conversations, people admitting that things may have been said and...