How 149 seconds of grainy footage made the case for Michael Vaughan

A nyone with a passing interest in the assassination of John F Kennedy knows about the Zapruder film, the silent 8mm sequence shot by Abraham Zapruder as the president’s car drove through Dallas on a fateful day in November 1963. For almost 60 years it has been picked over by experts and conspiracy theorists alike in the hunt for who really killed JFK.

Over four days in a stuffy room on Fleet Street in March, almost as much forensic scrutiny was applied to another grainy video. As Michael Vaughan sat watching the two minutes and 29 seconds of Sky Sports footage, spliced and diced, disputed and fought over, he knew that his reputation and career was on the line.

At the heart of the case were 14 words that the former England captain was alleged to have said to Yorkshire’s Asian players before their Twenty20 match against Nottinghamshire in 2009: “There’s too many of you lot; we have to have a word about that.” The problem for the Cricket Discipline Commission, who heard the case, was there was no equivalent to frame 313, which captured the fatal shot to Kennedy’s head.

However Vaughan’s high-powered legal team still decided to make it a cornerstone of his defence, which ended on Friday with the case against him not being proved. It turned out to be a masterstroke – even though the Sky footage of Yorkshire players in a huddle cut away during the crucial 19 seconds where Azeem Rafiq had alleged that Vaughan had uttered racist and discriminatory words.

Why was it so effective? It helped Vaughan’s case that one of the key witnesses, Adil Rashid, gave every impression of preferring to have faced the great West Indies bowling attacks of the 70s and 80s rather than Vaughan’s counsel, Christopher Stoner KC.

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