PCA hits out at former Yorkshire duo for responses to Azeem Rafiq investigation

The former Yorkshire chairmen Richard Hutton and Robin Smith have been heavily criticised for, respectively, failing to co-operate with the Professional Cricketers’ Association’s initial investigation into the racist abuse described by Azeem Rafiq, and for holding up progress.

In a meeting of the the digital, culture, media and sport select committee Julian Metherell, the PCA’s non-executive chairman, accused Hutton, who resigned as Yorkshire’s chairman last November, of failing to respond to repeated attempts to make contact before eventually providing “nothing that was in any way helpful”.

Meanwhile an interview with the Yorkshire Post given last week by Smith, who was chairman between 2002 and 2005 and again between 2018 and 2020, in which Lord Patel’s appointment as chair last year and his subsequent reforms were dismissed as “not valid”, was described as “abhorrent and totally obstructive”.

The PCA had been called to defend their record after Rafiq described their initial response to his accusations as “incredibly inept”. Rob Lynch, their chief executive, admitted that “in this dispute with Yorkshire we did not meet the standards we would have wished to”, and said the organisation had since apologised to Rafiq.

Metherell detailed his contact with Yorkshire over Rafiq’s allegations. “I personally tried to contact Mr Hutton on a number of occasions, both by email and telephone, and those calls and those emails went unanswered until I sent a note to Mr Hutton to say we were under increasing pressure to comment and we would be forced to go public and say Yorkshire were not returning any of our calls,” he said. “Mr Hutton did then get back to me, but nothing we received from Yorkshire at that time was in any way helpful.