Racism had been so endemic, he said, that players like Vaughan had likely not even realised how offensive they were being. Rafiq grandly told the parliamentary Digital, Culture, Media and Sport select committee he didn’t want to make it all about Vaughan, instead he was merely trying to draw attention to the important problem of institutional racism in English cricket, so that no player in future would ever have to encounter it. What was so remarkable about these posts was the way in which they undermined the ludicrous, more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger, holier than thou attitude Rafiq had struck while making his accusations against Vaughan and five other former players, the most high-profile of which was that Vaughan in 2009 had referred to a group of Asian players as ‘you lot’. He did this, no doubt at the panicked behest of his PR advisors, when the accusations of racism he’d aimed at former England captain Michael Vaughan appeared to have blown up comically in his face after the discovery of gnashingly anti-Semitic posts he’d made on Facebook: ‘Hahaha he is a jew… probs go after my 2nds again ha… how wrong is tht? Only jews do that sort of shit ha’, he’d typed. Rafiq, you will remember, in November 2021 went to hear in person from Holocaust survivor Ruth Barnett, 86, about her experience of being on the receiving end in Nazi Germany of what you’d probably have to say was on balance worse than anything you could possibly experience in or around a cricket ground. How refreshing it is to see the quaint concept of proof being demanded before a man’s life is ruined It’s perhaps still too early to tell if the Jewish and Muslim communities, here in Britain and indeed throughout the world, were brought closer by the actions of the former Yorkshire cricketer Azeem Rafiq.

Messenger issue today