Does English cricket have a problem with race? This has become an urgent question in the past week, driven not by some hard-won moment of forensic self-analysis but by comments on a podcast from the former England opener Michael Carberry.
It’s also a terrible question. Here’s a better one: is there any part of English cricket’s power structures that doesn’t have a problem with race?
Sometimes it helps to come at these things from an angle. There’s an excellent new book about cricket and race called The Unforgiven by the Australian writer Ashley Gray.
The Unforgiven tells the story of West Indian rebel tours to apartheid South Africa in the 1980s, focusing on the later lives of those players who took the Blood Rand. It is a gruelling tale at times, but then this was a brutal business all round for a group of men caught on the razor edge of history, who were allowed to cross the colour bar to enter “white” nightclubs and sit in the nice seats on planes, but who seemed at times to miss the bigger picture.
There is an infamous story about one tourist being asked what he thought about Nelson Mandela, and replying that he didn’t know who this fellow was as they hadn’t played against him. This may in itself be exculpatory flimflam. What is certain is that life has been hard since for these men.
David Murray (“I fucked up”) spends his days wandering the beaches of Barbados selling dope and living hand to mouth. Richard Austin got into cocaine and ended up begging. There are drinkers and drifters. Some are doing fine and seem at peace. Some died young. A more common theme is outsiderdom, diminished lives, even outright hostility. Make your choices. But nobody forgets.
At which point, it is an instructive exercise to compare how English cricket has treated its own apartheid tourists. And let’s be clear, when it comes to South Africa we’re not talking subtle structural racism. This was a full‑on baton-wielding white supremacist state. There is an argument black cricketers could be sporting missionaries in this world, agents for change, But the English had no such cover. They were there to make a buck, and to normalise a racist regime.
So what happened to them anyway? Well … of 30 rebel tourists 12 were welcomed back into the England Test team. Eight became England selectors or England coaches.
Mike Gatting, who captained the second rebel tour, who has not expressed any remorse other than over the negative effect on his own playing career, became an England selector and then president of the MCC. Get this: Gatting is to this day still employed by the furiously anti-racist ECB as a “cricket ambassador”. Jobs? Meet the boys.
The real kicker, the ultimate punchline, is David Graveney, who literally ran the rebel tour but seven short years later became England’s actual, goddamned, real-life chairman of selectors. Even more astonishing, at a time when the ECB is preaching publicly structural prejudice, Graveney still works for them!
Meet the ECB’s national performance manager, previously active in sports PR for apartheid South Africa, now charged with easing the entry of young cricketers into the English game.
I’m not suggesting these men are actively racist, or that they don’t have lots of great non-white cricketing mates. I’m also not suggesting the ECB is responsible for the wider forces driving cricket’s retreat from the cities and from many state schools, a sport increasingly walled up in its own pristine green squares.
But does anyone have a clue how this looks, in a system largely free of black administrators and coaches, and in a sport whose structures, geography and basic existence is still unavoidably bound in the spread of empire? Not to mention how down the years this sloppiness might transmit, might create the feeling of opacity, of unconscious bias, or obstacles to feeling entirely comfortable even on the inside.
Take a look back at those years when there were still black English-raised Test cricketers. Very few ever seemed settled, or escaped being cast as problematic. As recently as 1995 Phil DeFreitas and Devon Malcolm were being accused of lacking the same commitment levels as “unequivocal Englishmen” in an article in Wisden’s monthly magazine.
How does this look now? How welcome was Chris Lewis made to feel? Or indeed more recently Jofra Archer, the only black man in England’s Test squad – so laid-back, we hear, so naturally talented – who was made to train through a serious injury to show he had “fire in his belly” in South Africa, who gets asked if he’s feeling cold on the morning of his England debut in Malahide and called “Joffrey” by the blazers of power?
It fell to Carberry to speak about this. And Carberry has a unique perspective. He is the thing he’s talking about, the last black man from an English state school to make an England Test debut, a full 10 years ago. How long will that record stand?
In this sense English cricket is the perfect example of something else, of the self-defeating nature of a mono‑culture, the way racial prejudice creates a space where everyone loses. Here is a sport crying out for new talent, new interest, new footfall. But which retains its own internal, self-strangulating bars to entry. A culture of exclusion when nobody’s actually banging on the door to come in: this really is the endgame.
Maybe this is a generational thing, a case of letting in some light and sweeping out some cobwebs. In the meantime, perhaps someone could speed the process by writing a book about those in English cricket who played ball with apartheid, their subsequent embrace back into the structures of power, how this looks and feels and sets the thermostat. There is even an obvious title. You could call it The Forgiven.