[Cricket] Yorkshire cricket.end off

[Creaky]

'Let him who is without sin cast the first stone' seems massively appropriate here!

Absolutely not!

Unless you are suggesting that because he was guilty of racist comments himself he should have kept quiet about such comments aimed at him. One doesn’t excuse the other however as far as I am concerned.

 

[Harry Wilson's tackle]

I agree wholeheartedly that all racism matters and for completeness I would add that expressions of racism should always be viewed equally regardless of who the abuse is aimed at.

Indeed.

 

[Weststander]

So Vaughan, Bresnan, Hales and Hoggard all implicated so far..........

Anyone else I've missed (or anyone else he held a grudge against)

John Abrahams. He didn’t like his surname.

 

[Harry Wilson's tackle]

Absolutely not!

Unless you are suggesting that because he was guilty of racist comments himself he should have kept quiet about such comments aimed at him. One doesn’t excuse the other however as far as I am concerned.

Quite.

And while he is apparently penitent, the white cricketers are all in denial.

Edit: and there is a rather distasteful element of glee from some posters. JCFG, of course, but that's expected

 

[Sid in the Sharknado]

Quite.

And while he is apparently penitent, the white cricketers are all in denial.

Matthew Hoggard apparently rang him up to apologise for the language/jokes he used while they shared a dressing room. Which, apart from anything else, rather undermines the "he's making it up to get back at people he has a grudge against" line of argument.

Clearly we only have Rafiq's word for that, but since Hoggard hasn't denied either the words attributed to him or that he called him to apologise I'll assume it's true.

 

[Questions]

Because of Vaughn and his Yorkshire cronies racism …. Leeds have lost HS2 link now

 

[METALMICKY]

Absolutely not!

Unless you are suggesting that because he was guilty of racist comments himself he should have kept quiet about such comments aimed at him. One doesn’t excuse the other however as far as I am concerned.

No that's not at all what I implied. But painting himself as wholly the victim when he has been the perpetrator as well is not good. If he had come clean before The Times revelation and acknowledged that we must all learn would have been much better.

 

[McTavish]

No that's not at all what I implied. But painting himself as wholly the victim when he has been the perpetrator as well is not good. If he had come clean before The Times revelation and acknowledged that we must all learn would have been much better.

Rafiq has tried to steer clear of saying, "Person X called me a racist name and is therefore a racist", he has said, "The fact that person X called me a racist name and didn't feel bad about it and that person Y and Z stood by and didn't say anything and have now completely forgotten the event indicates a racist institution."

He has accepted that his anti-semitic comments were wrong and apologised for them, he hasn't tried to defend them as "banter". If anything that strengthens his position in my eyes.

 

[dazzer6666]

No that's not at all what I implied. But painting himself as wholly the victim when he has been the perpetrator as well is not good. If he had come clean before The Times revelation and acknowledged that we must all learn would have been much better.

Given the time and profile he has thrown at this, and knowing how every aspect would be picked over by all and sundry, it’s a bit bizarre that he didn’t come clean earlier - presumably he ‘forgot’ about the comments……he’s predictably now getting slaughtered from some quarters on social media.

 

[Sid in the Sharknado]

Given the time and profile he has thrown at this, and knowing how every aspect would be picked over by all and sundry, it’s a bit bizarre that he didn’t come clean earlier - presumably he ‘forgot’ about the comments……he’s predictably now getting slaughtered from some quarters on social media.

Whether Yorkshire's institutionally racist or not, between this and Ollie Robinson's old tweets we can definitely say that their social media training needs sorting out.

 

[cunning fergus]

Given the time and profile he has thrown at this, and knowing how every aspect would be picked over by all and sundry, it’s a bit bizarre that he didn’t come clean earlier - presumably he ‘forgot’ about the comments……he’s predictably now getting slaughtered from some quarters on social media.

These comments are one thing, the poor lamb pictured smiling in pictures with a team that plays indoor cricket in Melbourne is another. The team is made up of Pakistani lads.

The name of the team is boldly emblazoned on their shirts……..P-something-something-something Power.

Oh dear.

 

[dazzer6666]

These comments are one thing, the poor lamb pictured smiling in pictures with a team that plays indoor cricket in Melbourne is another. The team is made up of Pakistani lads.

The name of the team is boldly emblazoned on their shirts……..P-something-something-something Power.

Oh dear.

The pictures of him appearing to be necking something alcoholic straight from the bottle aren’t helping either.

 

[JC Footy Genius]

Rafiq has tried to steer clear of saying, "Person X called me a racist name and is therefore a racist", he has said, "The fact that person X called me a racist name and didn't feel bad about it and that person Y and Z stood by and didn't say anything and have now completely forgotten the event indicates a racist institution."

He has accepted that his anti-semitic comments were wrong and apologised for them, he hasn't tried to defend them as "banter". If anything that strengthens his position in my eyes.

It's good he apologised but it's not the same situation is it. Rafiq has made some accusations that are strongly disputed and remain unproven whereas his anti-Semitic comments are proven beyond any doubt, he had no wriggle room.

 

[Poojah]

It's an increasingly interesting story this as it rumbles on, and today's development serves as a reminder that few of us are completely free from prejudice, even those individuals who have been discriminated against themselves.

Whilst I think it's important that people who are subject to racial abuse or any other kind of discrimination feel they have the platform to call it out (and that having called it out that it will be dealt with appropriately) I also think we have to tread carefully when it comes to dredging up undocumented comments, allegedly made ten years ago or so. Time is an important factor.

There are a few reasons for this, but the main one is that I feel it's dangerous to judge people based on today's social parameters when the social parameters at the time were different. Go back far enough and there are those episodes of Fawlty Towers and Only Fools and Horses which use abhorrent racist language. In 2021 you'd be sacked for as much as writing it into a draft script, but at the time not an eyelid was batted by the general public. And whilst the general public is probably not a good barometer by which to set your own moral standards, it's what most people use to guide theirs.

That might have been the 70s or 80s, but we shouldn't forget how much has changed, for the better I might add, since the late noughties. I've thought long and hard about whether I should do this, on a Brighton forum of all places, but I'm going to do it anyway. I want to illustrate this very point by calling myself out.

Some context. In 2009, I posted a message on the Grimsby Town forum 'The Fishy' following a 2-0 home defeat to National League South Bath City in the first round of the FA Cup. We were bottom of League Two at the time and in complete disarray, so angry and a little bored I posted a rant. That's all it was, a rant on a football message board. There are probably hundreds of them every match day around the country, but for whatever reason this one went viral and I literally had national media wanting to do interviews with me (which I never did by the way, as it was all a bit cringe). Even today, if you Google "grimsby fan rant" it pops up.

Anyway, a few months later we were relegated for real. And this time I was very angry and in need of something cathartic, so I posted a follow-up rant documenting all of the things that were annoying me in light of our excruciating relegation:

https://forum.thefishy.co.uk/Blah.pl?m-1271541289/s-0/

This is the passage that has irked me for a while now as I've got a bit older, lamenting the fact that my dad took me to games as a nipper instead of going shopping with my mum:

Dad, you can fúck off. This is your fault. Your idea. You introduced me to this shower of shít. “Come with me to Blundell Park”, you said, “Come and support the boys”. What could I do? I was fúcking four, what choice did I have? Why not get me hooked on Heroin whilst you were at it? I could have gone with mum shopping for bras and knickers at British Home Stores, but no, you knew best.

Granted, I’d have probably grown up a homosexual but surely even being simultaneously búggered two guys named Seth and Quentin couldn’t hurt like this.

Seeing as we’re on the subject of homosexuality, Gok Wan can fúck off. No particular reason, I just plain don’t like the annoying, goggle-eyed cúnt.

Now, there's just so much wrong with that, and it galls me. It's written with an undertone that infers being gay isn't a good thing, and indulges in needless stereotypes in terms of the kind of names gay people are likely to have. And yes, not those lines specifically but the post in general was written with comedic intentions - I was trying to get a few laughs to cheer myself up at a dire moment, as sad as that is.

I was 25 and single when I wrote that. Today I am 36 and married with two children, and a very different person. Would I write that today? Not in a million years. Why? Because I've matured, because I've changed and because society has changed. But part of the reason I've changed is that society has too.

You work off and learn from the social queues of the people around you. I've gone back through the first three or four pages of responses of that post, and absolutely no one calls out those homophobic comments - which they absolutely were. As a young-ish, impressionable person living in that era, I learned nothing from making that post that such comments were harmful.

Is it reasonable to conflate the person that posted those comments in that era with the person that I am today, living in very different different times? I'm not sure it is. That person doesn't walk this earth anymore. In truth, I've improved in many ways and regressed in others, but I've become a very different person in the decade that has elapsed.

The moral of this story isn't that people shouldn't come out to tell of their horrendous experiences at the hands of discrimination. Even if historic, they absolutely should because there are lessons there to be learned that evidently hadn't been by that 25 year old me.

For me it comes down to this. If people are prepared to destroy the reputations and end the careers of people who have made admittedly stupid, hurtful, discriminating comments many years ago, they need to be pretty damn sure that they were of sufficient moral and social conscience to have taken issue with it at the time. We cannot judge yesterday's crimes by today's laws.

Anyway, I realise I've taken a risk in posting this, and I know I might get slaughtered for it. I hope I don't, as I love NSC - I just thought it was an important point to make.

 

[dazzer6666]

It's an increasingly interesting story this as it rumbles on, and today's development serves as a reminder that few of us are completely free from prejudice, even those individuals who have been discriminated against themselves.

Whilst I think it's important that people who are subject to racial abuse or any other kind of discrimination feel they have the platform to call it out (and that having called it out that it will be dealt with appropriately) I also think we have to tread carefully when it comes to dredging up undocumented comments, allegedly made ten years ago or so. Time is an important factor.

There are a few reasons for this, but the main one is that I feel it's dangerous to judge people based on today's social parameters when the social parameters at the time were different. Go back far enough and there are those episodes of Fawlty Towers and Only Fools and Horses which use abhorrent racist language. In 2021 you'd be sacked for as much as writing it into a draft script, but at the time not an eyelid was batted by the general public. And whilst the general public is probably not a good barometer by which to set your own moral standards, it's what most people use to guide theirs.

That might have been the 70s or 80s, but we shouldn't forget how much has changed, for the better I might add, since the late noughties. I've thought long and hard about whether I should do this, on a Brighton forum of all places, but I'm going to do it anyway. I want to illustrate this very point by calling myself out.

Some context. In 2009, I posted a message on the Grimsby Town forum 'The Fishy' following a 2-0 home defeat to National League South Bath City in the first round of the FA Cup. We were bottom of League Two at the time and in complete disarray, so angry and a little bored I posted a rant. That's all it was, a rant on a football message board. There are probably hundreds of them every match day around the country, but for whatever reason this one went viral and I literally had national media wanting to do interviews with me (which I never did by the way, as it was all a bit cringe). Even today, if you Google "grimsby fan rant" it pops up.

Anyway, a few months later we were relegated for real. And this time I was very angry and in need of something cathartic, so I posted a follow-up rant documenting all of the things that were annoying me in light of our excruciating relegation:

https://forum.thefishy.co.uk/Blah.pl?m-1271541289/s-0/

This is the passage that has irked me for a while now as I've got a bit older, lamenting the fact that my dad took me to games as a nipper instead of going shopping with my mum:



Now, there's just so much wrong with that, and it galls me. It's written with an undertone that infers being gay isn't a good thing, and indulges in needless stereotypes in terms of the kind of names gay people are likely to have. And yes, not those lines specifically but the post in general was written with comedic intentions - I was trying to get a few laughs to cheer myself up at a dire moment, as sad as that is.

I was 25 and single when I wrote that. Today I am 36 and married with two children, and a very different person. Would I write that today? Not in a million years. Why? Because I've matured, because I've changed and because society has changed. But part of the reason I've changed is that society has too.

You work off and learn from the social queues of the people around you. I've gone back through the first three or four pages of responses of that post, and absolutely no one calls out those homophobic comments - which they absolutely were. As a young-ish, impressionable person living in that era, I learned nothing from making that post that such comments were harmful.

Is it reasonable to conflate the person that posted those comments in that era with the person that I am today, living in very different different times? I'm not sure it is. That person doesn't walk this earth anymore. In truth, I've improved in many ways and regressed in others, but I've become a very different person in the decade that has elapsed.

The moral of this story isn't that people shouldn't come out to tell of their horrendous experiences at the hands of discrimination. Even if historic, they absolutely should because there are lessons there to be learned that evidently hadn't been by that 25 year old me.

For me it comes down to this. If people are prepared to destroy the reputations and end the careers of people who have made admittedly stupid, hurtful, discriminating comments many years ago, they need to be pretty damn sure that they were of sufficient moral and social conscience to have taken issue with it at the time. We cannot judge yesterday's crimes by today's laws.

Anyway, I realise I've taken a risk in posting this, and I know I might get slaughtered for it. I hope I don't, as I love NSC - I just thought it was an important point to make.

Not by me matey, that’s a good honest post and something I suspect lots of us can relate to even if we’re not prepared to admit it. In a way I’m extremely thankful there was no such thing as social media around when I was a kid/youth (70s) as I would 100% have posted stuff that I would now be massively regretting for the same reasons. I’m pretty sure as a kid I would have said at least as bad as what the cricketer has suffered. I’m a bit less sympathetic to things people have posted in the last 5-10 years maybe but where to draw the line is a difficult question.

 

[LamieRobertson]

It's an increasingly interesting story this as it rumbles on, and today's development serves as a reminder that few of us are completely free from prejudice, even those individuals who have been discriminated against themselves.

Whilst I think it's important that people who are subject to racial abuse or any other kind of discrimination feel they have the platform to call it out (and that having called it out that it will be dealt with appropriately) I also think we have to tread carefully when it comes to dredging up undocumented comments, allegedly made ten years ago or so. Time is an important factor.

There are a few reasons for this, but the main one is that I feel it's dangerous to judge people based on today's social parameters when the social parameters at the time were different. Go back far enough and there are those episodes of Fawlty Towers and Only Fools and Horses which use abhorrent racist language. In 2021 you'd be sacked for as much as writing it into a draft script, but at the time not an eyelid was batted by the general public. And whilst the general public is probably not a good barometer by which to set your own moral standards, it's what most people use to guide theirs.

That might have been the 70s or 80s, but we shouldn't forget how much has changed, for the better I might add, since the late noughties. I've thought long and hard about whether I should do this, on a Brighton forum of all places, but I'm going to do it anyway. I want to illustrate this very point by calling myself out.

Some context. In 2009, I posted a message on the Grimsby Town forum 'The Fishy' following a 2-0 home defeat to National League South Bath City in the first round of the FA Cup. We were bottom of League Two at the time and in complete disarray, so angry and a little bored I posted a rant. That's all it was, a rant on a football message board. There are probably hundreds of them every match day around the country, but for whatever reason this one went viral and I literally had national media wanting to do interviews with me (which I never did by the way, as it was all a bit cringe). Even today, if you Google "grimsby fan rant" it pops up.

Anyway, a few months later we were relegated for real. And this time I was very angry and in need of something cathartic, so I posted a follow-up rant documenting all of the things that were annoying me in light of our excruciating relegation:

https://forum.thefishy.co.uk/Blah.pl?m-1271541289/s-0/

This is the passage that has irked me for a while now as I've got a bit older, lamenting the fact that my dad took me to games as a nipper instead of going shopping with my mum:



Now, there's just so much wrong with that, and it galls me. It's written with an undertone that infers being gay isn't a good thing, and indulges in needless stereotypes in terms of the kind of names gay people are likely to have. And yes, not those lines specifically but the post in general was written with comedic intentions - I was trying to get a few laughs to cheer myself up at a dire moment, as sad as that is.

I was 25 and single when I wrote that. Today I am 36 and married with two children, and a very different person. Would I write that today? Not in a million years. Why? Because I've matured, because I've changed and because society has changed. But part of the reason I've changed is that society has too.

You work off and learn from the social queues of the people around you. I've gone back through the first three or four pages of responses of that post, and absolutely no one calls out those homophobic comments - which they absolutely were. As a young-ish, impressionable person living in that era, I learned nothing from making that post that such comments were harmful.

Is it reasonable to conflate the person that posted those comments in that era with the person that I am today, living in very different different times? I'm not sure it is. That person doesn't walk this earth anymore. In truth, I've improved in many ways and regressed in others, but I've become a very different person in the decade that has elapsed.

The moral of this story isn't that people shouldn't come out to tell of their horrendous experiences at the hands of discrimination. Even if historic, they absolutely should because there are lessons there to be learned that evidently hadn't been by that 25 year old me.

For me it comes down to this. If people are prepared to destroy the reputations and end the careers of people who have made admittedly stupid, hurtful, discriminating comments many years ago, they need to be pretty damn sure that they were of sufficient moral and social conscience to have taken issue with it at the time. We cannot judge yesterday's crimes by today's laws.

Anyway, I realise I've taken a risk in posting this, and I know I might get slaughtered for it. I hope I don't, as I love NSC - I just thought it was an important point to make.

Interesting post

 

[Sid in the Sharknado]

It's an increasingly interesting story this as it rumbles on, and today's development serves as a reminder that few of us are completely free from prejudice, even those individuals who have been discriminated against themselves.

Whilst I think it's important that people who are subject to racial abuse or any other kind of discrimination feel they have the platform to call it out (and that having called it out that it will be dealt with appropriately) I also think we have to tread carefully when it comes to dredging up undocumented comments, allegedly made ten years ago or so. Time is an important factor.

For me it comes down to this. If people are prepared to destroy the reputations and end the careers of people who have made admittedly stupid, hurtful, discriminating comments many years ago, they need to be pretty damn sure that they were of sufficient moral and social conscience to have taken issue with it at the time. We cannot judge yesterday's crimes by today's laws.

Anyway, I realise I've taken a risk in posting this, and I know I might get slaughtered for it. I hope I don't, as I love NSC - I just thought it was an important point to make.

I'll start by saying I don't judge you for things you wrote in the past, and (crucially) now realise are wrong.

I'll follow that by writing that the specific details in this case of who said what when are only a small part of the wider issue. The fact is that Yorkshire and to varying degrees cricket and many other sports have huge problems with accepting people from different backgrounds, which goes well beyond the particulars of this case. Getting bogged down in the Rafiq's character, what Vaughan said, whether Root was aware of anything, really doesn't help the issue. Banning people or paying compensation won't help. There has to be an acceptance that the is an actual problem, which should be obvious to anybody who considers the proportion of Asian players in recreational cricket compared to the professional game or the drastic fall in the number of black players in the system.

There's an article that Jonathan Liew wrote earlier this year - https://www.theguardian.com/footbal...-how-racists-can-keep-getting-away-with-abuse

The part of it that stuck in my mind is this:

"I discovered this on a much smaller scale only a few years ago. Towards the end of the last Ashes tour, an English journalist racially abused me in the press box of the Sydney Cricket Ground. Or, more specifically, in a corridor near the press box: a detail I now realise was hardly accidental. As the older journalist flatly denied making the remark he had made about eight seconds earlier, there was a devilish glint in his eye: the stomach-turning realisation that I would never be able to prove otherwise.

And in the end, he got away with it. Complaints were lodged. Grave, stony-faced summits were held. My version of events was scrutinised with a forensic laser focus. Did I have a grudge? Did I provoke him? Could I have heard something else? All he had to do, meanwhile, was deny everything. And – legally speaking – that was that. Game over."

Whatever Rafiq's flaws, and I don't doubt he has as many as the next man, it's not fair to hold him to a higher standard for bringing this behaviour to light than we do the other people in the dressing room at the time.

I'd also point out that the worst criticism has been of Andrew Gale and the more recent Yorkshire dressing room and management, this isn't an issue that came up 10-15 years ago and has gone away.

 

[e77]

He shouldn't have posted what he did in 2012 but that doesn't excuse what happened at Yorkshire CC afterwards.

Not sure that is too difficult to understand.

 

[Marty___Mcfly]

Haven’t really been following this story in details but I can’t help but think this is all just the start of floodgates opening exposing what has been going on in cricket, seems institutional.

Did they say over 1000 whistleblowers have come forward within a week of the call for more cases? If it’s those sorts of numbers already it’s huge.

In football the ‘end racism’ thing felt to me like it was targeted mainly at the fans, in cricket it is sounding embedded ‘in house’ with the payers and the staff..

 

[Berty23]

These comments are one thing, the poor lamb pictured smiling in pictures with a team that plays indoor cricket in Melbourne is another. The team is made up of Pakistani lads.

The name of the team is boldly emblazoned on their shirts……..P-something-something-something Power.

Oh dear.

I have seen the photo doing the rounds. He isn’t in it though. Is there one with him in?