Yorkshire cricket’s great divide: ‘We’ve got to stop looking over the fence at each other’

It’s five-to-one on a Saturday afternoon, and at Bowling Old Lane Cricket Club in inner city Bradford the second XI are about to play East Bierley. Mo Mistry wants to know if I’ve brought my white coat. Mistry, who has volunteered to stand for the home side at late notice, is a little disappointed when he realises I’m not the visiting umpire he’s been waiting on, but just a journalist. “You’re from the Guardian?” Mistry says. “You should just copy and paste the article your paper did when it came here 25 years ago,” he tells me. “Nothing’s bloody changed.”

Back then it was the reports of racism in the stands at Headingley that brought journalists to Bowling Old Lane. This time it was the reports of racism in Yorkshire’s committee and changing rooms. “We’ve been deluged,” says Haqueq Siddique, who does most of the day-to-day running of the club. Most of Siddique’s time is taken up with the same sort of stuff you’d find troubling any number of other clubs, the insurance claim from the neighbours, the broken roller and the missing Swiss rolls. But that’s not why three TV news crews came here last year.

Related: Rafiq welcomes chance of ‘closure’ after ECB charges in Yorkshire racism case

Around 30% of the male recreational cricketers in England have South Asian heritage but only 4% of the male professional cricketers do. It is a nationwide problem, but it has come into focus in Yorkshire after Azeem Rafiq spoke out about the way he was treated by the county team. Asked if the club was institutionally racist during a select committee hearing last November, the club’s former chairman, Roger Hutton, conceded it “falls within that definition”. Hutton was replaced, at the ECB’s behest, by Kamlesh Patel. He’s a Bradford boy,