Yorkshire cricket: the long view

The new chairman of Yorkshire County Cricket Club played a blinder in his first innings, consistently hitting the boundary and finding a settlement to defuse the troubling allegations made by the county’s former player Azeem Rafiq. It’s a pity he wasn’t moved up the order earlier, as Yorkshire’s performance in the storm over allegations of racism has been truly dreadful.

Cricket really needs to move beyond this as pretty soon a significant minority of the England team will be of Asian origin. Yorkshire was always a players’ county, seeing itself as a plain-speaking republic. But speaking as you find has its drawbacks, as does ‘banter’. Complaints about other counties are coming down the tracks.

Martin Luther King Jr. might not have been much of a cricket fan but he was on home ground when he spoke about the arc of the moral universe bending towards justice, though he admitted it was a long arc. A brilliant new book about the MCC’s controversial tour of the West Indies in 1953-54 illustrates quite how long: in Who Only Cricket Know, David Woodhouse writes a compelling account of a historic series marked by tantrums and turmoil, racism and riots, class conflicts and colonialism — and some great cricket.

The series was billed as ‘the World Championship of cricket’, involving some of the greatest players in history: besides the captain, Len Hutton, the tourists included Denis Compton, Peter May, Tom Graveney and Trevor Bailey, as well as Fred Trueman and Brian Statham and the spinners Jim Laker and Tony Lock. For the hosts there were the ‘Three Ws’ — Worrell, Walcott and Weekes — as well as the spin twins Ramadhin and Valentine.

But as one correspondent put it, the ‘colour question’ followed MCC around the Caribbean ‘like an evil shadow’.