‘I’ll never be able to look at Hoggard in the same light – racism leaves a deeper stain’
In the England team that won the 2005 Ashes, Matthew Hoggard seemed an unlikely but endearing hero. With his shaggy hair and loping gait, he looked like he might be more at home tilling the soil than toiling away at the Australian batting line-up.
But his swing bowling was beautiful and his batting, though terrible, full of guts. If Freddie Flintoff was the superman, lovable Hoggy was the everyman.
His persona appeared to be that of a wholehearted eccentric – a picture encouraged by an amusing autobiography ‘Hoggy – Welcome To My World’ which devoted eight of its pages to the practical jokes he was party to in the Yorkshire dressing room.
It turns out Hoggy’s world was a good deal less harmless than presented. There were many elements to Azeem Rafiq’s evidence to the DCMS which were deeply unpalatable but Hoggard’s contribution particularly so.
Nicknaming Rafiq ‘Rafa the Kaffir’, calling him “a P***” and “an elephant washer”, and telling him and the side’s other Asian players – ‘you lot sit over there near the toilets’ – was base, foul and unforgivable.
Say it ain’t so Hoggy. But, shamefully, it was.
What should be the right response when sportsmen we like turn out not to be the people we had hoped?
Can we separate out the footballer who scores the lastminute winner from the man inside the shirt who cheats on his wife or bursts a Covid bubble? After the initial storm has blown over, yes as a rule.
But racism is different. It leaves a deeper stain. So how to regard Hoggard now? Rafiq was generous enough to accept his apologies when he called to ask for forgiveness – as he no doubt hopes the Jewish community will be to him for his texts – but personally I will never be able to look at Hoggard in the same light.
The same recalibration applies to the captain of that 2005 side, Michael Vaughan. The first thought at the mention of Vaughan’s name now is not about him lifting the Urn that unforgettable summer or the three centuries he scored Down Under in 2002-03 or even his career as a broadcaster since, but what he said – or didn’t say – to Yorkshire’s four Asian players after a huddle at Trent Bridge in 2009.
When Vaughan appears on our TV screens this winter as part of BT Sport’s Ashes
coverage, he will be carrying uncomfortable baggage. The ‘too many of you lot’ comment that Rafiq, Adil Rashid and Rana Naved-ulHasan claim to have heard, but Vaughan maintains never passed his lips, is a stain that will take a long time to wash away. It will never go completely.
The ripples from the Rafiq earthquake continue to spread out from its Headingley epicentre. It is not just English cricket that is affected. But cricket is where the torch beam is directed at present and the affair has cast a long shadow.
Before the book is closed on this searingly painful episode there will be more misery uncovered, more reputations trashed and more home truths for English cricket to confront.
Many will be left to reflect on things said and left unsaid, and that they could and should have done more to be a decent human being. Because, in the end, that is all that is required to defeat racism.