This great club has had a dagger put through its heart. As chairman I must make sure Yorkshire survives
C‘I wrote to Rafiq from the club to say sorry if those things happened’
OLIN GRAVES looks out from the offices on the top floor of the Headingley pavilion to survey the scene at the start of the new season.
‘It is great to see the sun out because all we have seen is rain, rain, rain,’ says the returning Yorkshire chairman. It is a reference to the weather but it could easily be a metaphor for the mood at the club, where there is finally a ray of light after the gloom of the Azeem Rafiq racism scandal.
This being Yorkshire, though, it is not all clear skies ahead. And as dark clouds eventually move in to delay the start of play, off the pitch there have also been unwelcome developments on the morning that we meet.
First, the Culture, Media and Sport Committee have released a report urging the ECB to ‘closely monitor’ Yorkshire following Graves’ controversial comeback two months ago, to ensure ‘there is no return to the business as usual that allowed a culture of discrimination to thrive’.
‘I find that a bit insulting,’ the typically forthright 76-year- old tells Mail Sport, pointing out that he has already invited the ECB to send an observer to their board meetings for the next 12 months. ‘The club has put a lot of good things in place. Why would we change any of that?’
Then, hours later, Yorkshire publish their annual accounts recording a loss of £7.1million — a £2.8m trading deficit and a £4.3m depreciation of assets — in a year in which they hosted an Ashes Test. ‘As I wrote in the annual report, it’s an annus horribilis,’ says Graves. ‘An Ashes year is like winning the Lottery and we still managed to lose £3m trading.
‘That takes some doing. It is an overspend on everything. There has been no cost control at all. They have spent money they haven’t had.’
That, in a nutshell, is why Graves has returned home to Yorkshire, nine years after he left to take charge of the ECB. ‘There is only one reason I have come back and that is to make sure Yorkshire is sustainable and doesn’t disappear,’ says the man who previously helped save the county from financial ruin in 2002.
‘I had no intention or vision of returning when I left in 2015. But it was on the verge of going into administration. It was two weeks away. As soon as I get this place on an even keel, in two to three years, I will be disappearing into the sunset again.’
Were it not for another party disappearing into the sunset, he would not be sitting here in this empty fifth-floor office. Former Newcastle owner Mike Ashley was on the brink of completing a £23m financial rescue of the club, which would have seen him buy Headingley — something Graves insists would have been ‘wrong’.
‘The Ashley deal was supposedly ready to go, contracts were due to be exchanged, and then it never happened,’ explains Graves. ‘Mr Ashley seemed to disappear and didn’t come to the table when he was due to. That is when they phoned me to see if I would still be interested.’
Graves had initially withdrawn his bid for the club last summer. But his offer of a £1m loan and promise of a further £4m investment was seen as the ‘one viable option’. Graves’ family trust is owed almost £15m by the club, but he scoffs at the suggestion that is why he has returned.
‘This is not about getting my money back one bit,’ he insists. ‘If it was, I’d have told them to sell it to Mike Ashley because I would have got it back overnight.
It is just about making sure this business is sustainable going forward and back on track where it should be.’
To do so, Graves (right) has already displayed his ruthlessness with last month’ s departure of
Darren Gough, the highest-paid director of cricket in the country on £250,000 per year. ‘Those kind of salaries are not sustainable,’ he says. ‘Stupid contracts.’ Later down the line, and in a move which would be far more contentious, Graves does not rule out taking the club out of members’ control and selling to an external investor.
‘I won’t dictate that, the market will,’ he says. ‘ Things are changing in cricket. You’ve got Hampshire looking to do a deal with Delhi Capitals. If that happens, the whole thing changes. But the first thing we’ve got to do is get ourselves sorted out. Unfortunately, for the last two and a half years it has got distracted.’ A distraction is one way of putting the Rafiq affair, which almost brought down a 161- yearold institution. The allegations of racism made by the former Yorkshire spinner — and the club’s mishandling of them — led to the ECB temporarily banning them from hosting internationals and several sponsors walking away.
Last year, Yorkshire were fined £400,000 and docked 48 points after admitting a ‘ failure to address systemic use of racist and discriminatory language over a prolonged period and a failure to take adequate action’. Graves’s previous spell as chairman — from 2012 to 2015 — overlapped with Rafiq’s first stint as a player. HE still does not understand, though, why some have tried to drag him into the scandal. ‘I haven’t been accused of anything,’ he says. ‘When I was here, nothing was brought to the table. I never heard anything from anybody. The majority of the complaints were in 2018 and I wasn’t even here. So why are they linking it with me?
‘I ran a business with 1,700 customers, 85 per cent of those were Asian. I have dealt with Asians all my life. Are they accusing me of being racist? Good on them. Let them try.’
Graves accepts he did not help himself last year when he said some of the claims of racism could have been ‘banter’. ‘I used a word that was misinterpreted by a lot of people,’ he says. ‘It wasn’t meant to antagonise anybody. If they took offence, I apologise.’
Graves also came under fire in February when he told MPs he had not personally apologised to Rafiq because he had ‘plenty of things going on’. Explaining himself to Mail Sport, he says: ‘I saw no reason at that time for me to apologise to Rafiq. I wasn’t in cricket. I’d done nothing wrong.’
Since returning to Yorkshire, Graves reveals: ‘I have written to Mr Rafiq on behalf of the club saying sorry if all those things happened. I haven’t had a reply.’ Would he welcome a conversation? ‘I’ve always said I’ll talk to anybody at any time,’ he insists.
At the core of it, Graves strongly refutes Rafiq’s fundamental claim that Yorkshire is or was institutionally racist — and was furious when former chairman Roger Hutton accepted that to be case in 2021. He is also scathing of his predecessor Lord Patel for sacking 16 members of staff, including the entire coaching team.
‘Yorkshire is not institutionally racist. Never has been,’ he says. ‘When Yorkshire admitted to that, that hurt and it hurt a lot of people. A lot of those people have had their lives, careers and health ruined. They were mistreated. They were accused of things that they certainly are not. I felt really sorry for them. The way it was handled was poor to say the least. It put a dagger through the heart of this club.’
Last month, Yorkshire denied reports that they had discussed bringing back some of those sacked staff members, including former director of cricket Martyn Moxon in place of Gough.
But Graves says: ‘We live in a free world. Those guys got kicked out for no reason. The majority have of them won employment tribunals. Why shouldn’t they be re-employed? Not that I want to re-employ them but if a job comes up and they want to apply, it’s a free world. If they are the best person for the job then it’s down to whoever does the selection.’
Graves has no plans to appoint Gough’s successor until the end of the season. For now, he wants to wait to see what happens on and off the pitch this summer, as Yorkshire attempt to win promotion back to Division One.
‘That is more important than anything,’ he adds. ‘There is no point getting the financials sorted if we have a poor team. We want to be back in the first division. We want to be winning trophies.
‘We have got to put the last few years behind us. That is history now. We’ve all got to move on. I’ve said to all the staff, “Forget what’s happened, we’ve got positive things to look forward to and let’s make it work”.’
There is, perhaps, sunshine after the rain.