Photograph: Richard Heathcote/Getty Images
Holding Up a Mirror to Cricket, the report unveiled on Tuesday by the Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket (ICEC), will make all but the most blinkered cricket aficionados reconsider the sport they love. The commission deserves credit for nailing the indifference to discrimination that has eaten away at the fabric of the game. Many have suffered cruelly for years. Others have attempted to blow the whistle on degrading behaviour, only to see very little change. For far too long, cricket’s hierarchy has been complacent and self-congratulatory over trivial attempts to right wrongs. The England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) has deluded itself into thinking that the sport could continue like a time capsule from the past – transmitting the “racism, sexism, elitism and classism” into a future that regards such bigotry, rightfully, as anathema.
Can a sport that is being outpaced by football risk not drawing on the full spectrum of the human experience, particularly by not seeking out talent that has been hitherto silenced or underrepresented? No, a search for such talent would only enrich the game. That is why the ECB ought to embrace the very sensible ICEC recommendations: to embed a commitment to inclusivity in its administration; establish an action plan to reverse the decline of cricket in black communities; seek to remove the class barriers that exist in cricket; allocate more resources to the women’s game and move towards pay parity between professional male and female players by 2029-30; and play women’s Tests at Lord’s rather than the Eton v Harrow and Oxford v Cambridge matches.
The commission’s profound questioning of what might be called the foundation myth of cricket – that the game has always been a social unifier in Britain and an imperial “civilising” mission – is refreshing. While this 317-page document is organised in numbered paragraphs like the driest of legal texts, the chapter on cricket’s history is a riveting read. The work is guided by the spirit of the great Trinidadian writer CLR James, who argued that to understand the nature and extent of inequity in cricket, one must go beyond the game, to history itself.
The report says “we believe that cricket needs to engage more frankly with the fact that, despite conjuring images of tradition, continuity and togetherness, cricket’s history is also replete with tensions and social conflicts, even histories of brutality and oppression”. There is a delicious irony in the fact that John Major, who perhaps has a roseate view of cricket’s past, wrote the foreword, recalling “with a warm glow” his upbringing in Brixton playing cricket with young West Indian migrants.
Sir John supports the idea that cricket needs, in the ECB jargon, a “reset”. The report, commissioned by the ECB in response to Black Lives Matter and #MeToo and produced by four independent commissioners chaired by Cindy Butts, dismisses the idea of a lost Eden, arguing that the sport has always been divided between “the rural and the urban; social classes; ‘gentlemen’ and ‘players’; North and South; private and state educated; men and women; and between White colonisers and ‘non-White’ peoples”. Cricket, the report justly argues, does not need to rediscover its roots; it needs to tear up those roots.
The ECB has made the “unqualified public apology” for past failings that the commissioners demanded. The report found that the “white, middle-class men” who dominate cricket as players, administrators and spectators did not think their beloved game had a problem with discrimination or inclusivity. Claiming the report’s recommendations are “woke” is a fig leaf for prejudice. Perhaps many of those in the Lord’s pavilion today have found themselves Bazballed. Despite their sedentariness, they may not take it sitting down. But cricket’s future starts with a battle over its past.
