Tin-eared county chairmen show why English cricket is in trouble

“The other thing in the diversity bit is the football and rugby worlds become much more attractive to the Afro-Caribbean community. In terms of the south Asian community, we find that they do not want to commit the time that is necessary to get to the next step. They prefer to go into educational fields.”

“I know one Caribbean overseas player … who termed himself ‘Token’, so there was a degree of humour in it … It’s difficult to call it offensive.”

“We have a women’s section.”

“We have a full-time female physiotherapist.”

“I had dinner with Desmond Haynes recently.”

Thank you gentlemen. Thanks for coming. Thank you for shedding an entirely unintended shard of light.

In decades to come, as future historians of what was once the national summer sport come to pick over those jealously tended ashes, trying to understand how English cricket fostered its self-sabotaging culture of exclusion, they would do well to examine the contents of Tuesday morning’s hearing before the digital, culture, media and sport select committee into how the county game hopes to address the problems around diversity and reach identified by Azeem Rafiq and others in the last year.

Called to give evidence, Mike O’Farrell and Rod Bransgrove, the chairmen of Middlesex and Hampshire, dished up a performance that was often tin-eared, frequently painful, at times verging on parody; but always unintentionally illuminating.

There were some good intentions here and some fine words, mixed in with the dreadful, elbow-gnawing ones. Mainly, what the men in the committee chamber told us was exactly why English cricket is in trouble: because people like this are in charge.

The most notable moment came as O’Farrell tried to explain why black and south Asian