Azeem Rafiq: ‘The ECB needs a reset of its morals and values – simple as that’

“I am exhausted,” Azeem Rafiq says quietly as, just before eight in the morning, he takes a deep breath and straightens his black tie. The 30-year-old former cricketer, who exposed the institutional racism at the heart of a sport he once loved, is dressed in a sombre black suit. His mood is as composed and candid as it was when he gave his harrowing testimony in parliament to the DCMS select committee two months ago. “It’s a burden I’ve been carrying a very long time,” Rafiq says. “So to get all that off my chest to the select committee was a massive relief. I slept well that night. But since then it’s been a whirlwind.”

Rafiq feels under threat, unsettled by warnings that he and his family are in danger. There are also sustained attempts to undermine him and Rafiq is convinced some powerful forces are intent on muzzling him.

But here he is, on a bright yet icy morning in London, ready for a 90-minute interview which uncovers his family’s frightening departure from Karachi in 2001 and takes us through distressing years of prejudice to a seventh-floor balcony in Barnsley where he twice came close to ending his life. At the same time, with a sense of the cricketing joy he has since lost, Rafiq reflects on his past achievements while considering how England’s latest Ashes debacle mirrors a broken game in this country.

Rather than a reset for Test cricket, Rafiq concludes that the ECB needs “a reset of their morals and values – simple as that.”

In November, after articulating the racism he had endured in Yorkshire, there was such acclaim for his raw honesty that many people believed English cricket had reached a watershed. Rafiq shakes his head now. “I don’t even know the word for it. Astonishing, maybe, because I still