Lord Patel recognises pressures on Yorkshire but hopes team can focus on cricket

Yorkshire chair Lord Patel recognises the lingering external pressures on the club over their much-publicised cultural shift but he hopes the playing group can now focus on the season ahead.

Patel has overseen sweeping reforms after being parachuted into his role amid one of the most turbulent spells in Yorkshire’s history following Azeem Rafiq’s damning claims of racial harassment and bullying.

But several institutions are monitoring the situation closely, from the England and Wales Cricket Board to a Digital, Culture, Media and Sport select committee and the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

And speaking to promote a venture with the aptly-named Clean Slate Studioz – an India-based global streaming platform which has a “mission for equality” – Patel knows the club are not out the woods yet.

He told the PA news agency: “We keep looking back because it informs us looking forward. But this is certainly not an overnight case. We’ve still got a lot of pressures, rightly so.

“Everybody talks about the ECB and the DCMS but what people tend to forget is had the Equality and Human Rights Commission investigated us, we would have been in the wilderness for at least a couple of years, because it’s a damning thing for a regulator who felt unlawful discrimination had taken place.

“That keeps us on our toes, it makes us do what we want but it’s going to take time, there’s no question about it.

“I just hope that we can be a beacon for others, we can be a blueprint and we’ll make some mistakes along the way but having partners like Clean Slate will challenge us.”

Several sponsors cut ties with Yorkshire and they were temporarily stripped of staging England games at Headingley, which has since been restored, after their initial