English cricket’s reign of shame exposed with devastating admission of guilt

Y ou may want to sit down for this part. Turns out – no, seriously – that a sport created and codified for the purpose of allowing rich white landowners to bet against each other, and then exported around the world at gunpoint with the promise that it would civilise savage peoples, may not actually be that progressive.

How can this possibly have happened? Who do we see about this? And who’s asking, anyway?

The publication of the Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket’s report into systemic discrimination in the English game will doubtless be described as many things. A wake‑up call. A line in the sand. A humiliation. What it represents to those who have been arguing the point for many years is, rather, a kind of historical artefact: documentary proof that English cricket’s in-built prejudice against women, people of colour and people from poorer backgrounds is not some fey liberal invention or a jaundiced troublemaker’s charter, but a lived reality for many people for many years, perhaps even generations.

It is above all a devastatingly frank document, both in its analysis of the problem and its proposed solutions. The England and Wales Cricket Board’s first‑look response, a wide-ranging apology for the injustices that have occurred on its watch, may feel instinctively like so much corporate whitewash. But even a few years ago the very idea that the national governing body would admit its complicity in a racist, sexist system would have felt fanciful. In this case, diagnosis really can be the first step of the treatment.

And here the ICEC helpfully provides the hard data to back up decades of hunches and anecdotes. A staggering 87% of respondents of Pakistani and Bangladeshi heritage, 82% with Indian heritage and