Yorkshire would have gone bankrupt without Tests return, admits Lord Patel

Lord Patel, the Yorkshire chair, has admitted that the club would have gone bankrupt had it not been cleared to host the third Test, which got under way beneath a blazing sun at Headingley on Thursday.

Yorkshire were originally suspended from hosting international cricket last November as the ECB investigated Azeem Rafiq’s allegations of racism at the club. Lord Patel’s appointment was formally approved the following day, and as extensive and often controversial changes to staffing and practices were introduced the ban was provisionally lifted in February. This Test was confirmed only after members overwhelmingly ratified Patel’s proposed changes at an extraordinary general meeting on 31 March.

“Being totally honest going back to November this seemed a very distant opportunity. It seemed a bit of a pipedream,” he told the BBC. “When I first came into the job I was determined to make it happen. I thought it would run a lot smoother than it did. It was far, far tougher.

“[The scandal] was huge. It hit all of the press. The politicians were engaged. It hit the governing body. It affected the whole of English cricket and it brought in the Equality and Human Rights Commission. Understandably when I walked through the doors all five of those groups were saying Test matches aren’t coming back here. It was because of that panic situation that people didn’t [appreciate] that actually if Test matches or international matches didn’t come back here we were going to go bankrupt. We literally were.”

Yorkshire were charged with bringing the game into disrepute by the ECB’s Cricket Discipline Commission last week, with hearings scheduled to start in September and potential sanctions including points deductions, fines or relegation – but