Disciplinary proceedings over charges resulting from racism allegations at Yorkshire will take place in public.
The England and Wales Cricket Board’s Disciplinary Commission made the decision after preliminary hearings took place on 17 and 18 October.
The move is unprecedented – the Cricket Disciplinary Commission usually operates in private.
Yorkshire and seven individuals have been charged as a result of claims made by Azeem Rafiq.
Former Yorkshire spinner Rafiq first detailed the allegations in September 2020, saying racism at the club had left him feeling suicidal.
The county were charged in June of this year, alongside former England internationals Michael Vaughan, Matthew Hoggard, Tim Bresnan, Gary Ballance, ex-Scotland international John Blain, and former Yorkshire coaches Andrew Gale and Richard Pyrah.
The hearings are expected to begin at the end of November.
Gale has already said that he will not engage with the process. In September he and Pyrah agreed compensation with Yorkshire after their “unfair” sackings.
The hearings will take place a year after ECB chief executive Tom Harrison told the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport select committee in November 2021 that English cricket was approaching an “emergency” over its failure to address racism and the ECB had “struggled” to get the first-class game to “wake up”.
When the committee’s report was published, chair Julian Knight MP described Rafiq’s story as “typical of an endemic problem across the whole of cricket“.
Since Rafiq’s accusations became public, 16 members of staff have left Yorkshire in a widespread overhaul of its senior leadership.
In June the ECB said it had carried out a “thorough and complex” investigation to establish the grounds for the charges against both the county and the individuals involved.
It said the charges arose from alleged breaches of a directive regarding “conduct which is improper or which may be prejudicial to the interests of cricket or which may bring the ECB, the game of cricket or any cricketer into disrepute”, and its anti-discrimination code.
Analysis
Stephan Shemilt, chief cricket writer
This is a huge development in a scandal that has threatened to tear English cricket apart.
To have some of the most serious allegations made by Rafiq pored over in public, with those on both sides taking the stand and open to cross-examination, will be extraordinary.
It will almost certainly be bruising for many and it will reopen wounds that first surfaced in Rafiq’s testimony to a DCMS select committee almost a year ago.
Whether or not the case brings closure for those involved is debatable – the whole episode has probably been too damaging.
And it certainly won’t address the wider issue of discrimination in the game, especially with a potentially explosive report from the Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket due in the new year.
