It is tempting to see no winners but ECB’s judgment is a victory for Rafiq

L ooking back at the footage now, Trent Bridge, 22 June 2009, the players of Yorkshire CCC about to walk out on to the field to face Nottinghamshire in the late evening sunshine, it is hard not to feel a sense of English cricket’s own Zapruder film being spliced into place. Every act, every cutaway, every pause, every edit seems undercut by a sense of historical weight, the smiles, the backslaps, the grassy knoll, the man smoking by the fence, details that will be pored over by endless sets of eyes, meshed and overlaid into their own competing Warren Commissions.

Here is Michael Vaughan shaking hands, Jacques Rudolph frowning, Azeem Rafiq, playing just his second T20 game, beaming with nervous energy, with that sense throughout of something happening, or not happening, or half happening just out of sight.

In this version of reality the corpse on the slab, subject of the current public autopsy, of the forensic piecing together of bone and brain and guts, is of course English cricket and beyond that Yorkshire CCC, the culture of professional sport, and the wider society into which all of this is simply an observation porthole.

Fourteen years on from Dealey Plaza, Nottinghamshire, we have the spectacle of Rafiq being cross-examined by a furiously competent KC over his recall of proven, admitted institutional racism, and the precise form of words used in a huddle full of adrenaline while simultaneously processing your bowling plans for Will Jefferson. We have the meticulously compiled results of the panel tipping itself, face first into the seething offal pot of Tim Bresnan’s WhatsApp messages, all the better to decipher the precise meaning of Tim Bresnan repeatedly using the word “Bro”, or the likelihood that Tim Bresnan