LONDON: Cricket’s culture of drinking alcohol is alienating British Muslims, whistleblower Azeem Rafiq said at a literature festival this week.
Pakistan-born former off-spinner Rafiq, who first raised allegations of racism and bullying in September 2020 related to his two spells at Yorkshire County Cricket Club, was speaking at the Hay Festival on Thursday.
He said club cricket in England “revolved around alcohol,” which was “excluding Muslims specifically, but everyone who doesn’t drink,” The Times reported.
He added: “Every part of it, the minute you turn up to a club to the minute you leave, is around alcohol. The game needs to evolve its economy so it doesn’t at recreational level revolve around alcohol.”
This feeling of exclusion had led many British Asians and Muslims to set up their own cricket clubs away from mainstream club cricket, Rafiq added.
He told the festival that around 30 percent of players at recreational level were of British Asian heritage, but that this number plummeted to around 4 percent at professional level.
“The reason Asian people have gone and set up on their own is because they felt excluded from the system,” he said, adding that separate systems were “exactly the type of thing the racists want.”
The Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket report, known as the ICEC, was published last June and found the sport in England was “infected” with institutional racism, sexism and class-based discrimination.
Actor and comedian Stephen Fry, who was on the same panel as Rafiq, echoed its findings.
He slammed the influential Marylebone Cricket Club, the former custodians of the game, as having a public face that “stinks” of “privilege and classism.”
He added: “It (MCC) has a public face which is a deeply disturbing sort of beetroot-colored gentleman in yellow and orange blazer sitting in front of the Long Room at Lord’s Cricket Ground and looking as if they had come out of an Edwardian cartoon.
“The game will not survive (if it continues) giving off an atmosphere that puts people off.”
