Lord Patel must see off Yorkshire backlash if reforms are to work

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They have two summer sports in Yorkshire: playing cricket and arguing about it. It’s been this way since at least the 1950s, on into the Boycott years, right up to the present day and the ongoing row about the attempts to reform the club made by Lord Patel since he took over as chairman last November.

“I didn’t want anyone at Yorkshire to lose their jobs, I just wanted an acknowledgment that I had been treated dreadfully,” Azeem Rafiq wrote in this year’s Wisden Almanack in an article reflecting on the abuse scandal. “We are where we are now because Yorkshire wanted a fight.” And some of them still haven’t quit.

Patel saw off an attempt by one of his predecessors, Robin Smith, to derail the process at an extraordinary general meeting in March, but Smith has come back for more in the runup to the third Test at Headingley. Yorkshire have gone to great lengths to get this game back on after the England and Wales Cricket Board took it away from them.

“We accept that we’re under scrutiny and that the eyes of the world will be on us,” their chief operating officer, Andy Dawson, told the Yorkshire Post this week. And now in lunges Smith. He is one of four former Yorkshire chairmen who are calling for an inquiry into the ECB’s handling of the case, along with Steve Denison, Roger Hutton and Colin Graves.

Graves was, of course, chairman of the ECB until 2020. If he wants to launch an inquiry into institutional incompetence at the governing body, you might assume he is willing to be questioned about his own part in it during the five years