Why a shattered Yorkshire CCC needs to be rebuilt - Chris Waters

A bit like a relationship that has gone so badly wrong that there is no possible hope of mending it, the crisis goes from disaster to disaster.

How do you fix it? How do you possibly put the glass object back together again? You can’t. It is, alas, irreparably broken.

All one can do now is survey the glass pieces on the hard surface and go one of two ways. Either, as seems to have been happening for months, one can stubbornly try to put those glass pieces back in place and hope that no one will notice the cracks and fissures, or else one can get a large sweeping brush, gather up the pieces and take them down to the nearest recycling site.

That, unfortunately, is the only way forward.

It is time to end this chaos for good.

Although the previous glass object has gone forever, in this case the previous incarnation of Yorkshire CCC, its replacement must be built on properly constructed and transparent lines. That is palpably not the case under the present administration; it is just as tarnished as the previous one.

For that reason, and sorry as it is to say, chairman Lord Kamlesh Patel must depart, while other board members must consider their positions and exactly what they have got themselves into.

Patel might be the nicest chap in the world – I really have no idea because he won’t let journalists within five feet of him. But just as the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport select committee, chaired by Julian Knight MP, sat on key evidence relating to the crisis – in other words, they didn’t tell you about it – so Patel has kept the same counsel.

Whichever way you look at it, that is an insult to the members, because if – as the independent report conducted by the international law firm Squire Patton Boggs concluded – Rafiq did not lose his career to racism, that Yorkshire did in fact support him through the loss of his son, that he himself was alleged to have made a number of comments concerning a team-mate’s nationality, and so on, then members deserved to know.

Instead, Patel – who admitted at his inaugural press conference that “what I’ve seen so far (of the report) does feel uncomfortable” – is as discredited as Knight; on what basis has he forced through sweeping changes to the club’s rules, indemnifying himself in the process from huge financial decisions?

I wouldn’t mind, but more than 20 people have lost their jobs, some of whom I know well and would vouch for personally. What about their mental health, their reputational damage, their lost careers on untested and/or undisclosed evidence?

Now an EGM has been called for September 13 – presumably the press will be kept out of that too (I wonder why Yorkshire haven’t been letting us into their meetings since Patel took charge?) – to appoint two members to the board.

Colin Graves’s efforts to get back in failed (of course they did) and so members are being asked to back John Jackson, a barrister, and Richard Levin, a businessman.

But the time for trying to put back together this broken glass object is over. What Yorkshire need now is a true “clean slate”.