It’s hard, in fact, to not be overwhelmed by this sweep. In response, the ECB will take three months to consider the report and if that comes across as evasive, or a deflection of responsibility, it shouldn’t. This is not a report you skim through. It needs consideration. It needs time. It needs digestion.
The vastness and intractability at play is one of the truths Adil Ray hits upon in his new documentary ‘Is Cricket Racist?’. It comes at the end of an enlightening discussion with Tom Brown, an academic who has been researching the lack of British South Asian representation in the professional game.
Brown also works as a coach at Warwickshire and is co-founder of SACA (South Asian Cricket Academy), which is helping British South Asian cricketers progress into the professional game. In 2022, six graduates of the SACA male programme received county contracts and in 2023, one female graduate was placed on a county development programme.
Brown gives Ray, a prominent British Asian actor and presenter, a little glimpse into the kind of research he’s been doing. For example, Brown doesn’t think it is a conscious decision to not pick players of colour, just that in subjective assessments of players, subtle cultural differences that means those players act, behave and learn differently are being overlooked. Are younger players of South Asian origin, Brown posits, misunderstood as rude or disinterested in not making eye contact when talking to a figure of authority, instead looking down because that is, in some traditions, a show of respect to that authority?
Brown’s research has found that being white and educated at a private (fee-paying) school is 13 times more likely to make one a professional cricketer than being white and educated at a state school; and that white and privately educated kids are 34 times more likely to become professional cricketers than Asian, state-school educated ones. And with the black community it is participation even at a recreational level that is an issue (something Ebony Rainford-Brent’s excellent ACE programme is targeting). “Different communities,” concludes Brown, “require different interventions.”
The sheer depth of the complexity now strikes Ray. The race issues are complicated enough, and this isn’t – it can’t be – about race alone. It’s great, Ray says, that there are people such as Brown doing what they’re doing. But equally it’s worrying because, as he now realises, that “is a lot of work, for a lot of people to really grasp and be committed to and see through”.
Is everyone really willing to do this, to stay the course, six months down the line, two years down the line? A decade down the line?
The MCC stands proudly as the custodian of the laws of the game. It owns the ground that is known as the Home of Cricket. Except that it’s a home in the way that Buckingham Palace is a home for the Royal Family. Ray questions the lack of diversity among club membership and asks whether it is possible to ever change that. The challenge, says Lavender, is to do that in a way that is fair, because that might require tearing up the membership model and with it the club’s 30-year waiting list, which would not be fair to those who are on that list.
Ray points out people of colour have been treated unfairly and excluded for years. Maybe some unfairness to those in positions of power and privilege for far too long is due? Turns out, it isn’t a question of fairness anymore. It is, Lavender says in a tone that brings this discussion to an abrupt dead end, a question of the law. Left unsaid is that this is a members’ club, with its own laws of membership and its own legal implications because of it. And that’s that.
Is cricket racist? Is that the right question anymore?
Is Cricket Racist? will air on Channel 4 at 11.05pm on July 18. It will also be available on the Channel 4 website.
Osman Samiuddin is a senior editor at ESPNcricinfo