Why game needs an independent view at watershed moment

⮞commission looking into racism must be provided with the funding and time to ask the right questions

In the absence of leadership at the England and Wales Cricket Board, the focus falls on the Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket to tackle the racism that is being widely alleged and partly admitted.

Will this commission be independent, even though it has been set up by the ECB? Probably, yes. But will the commission, as it stands, be able to deliver its report and recommendations by next summer, its stated deadline? Almost certainly not.

The key to the problem is this: the commission is independent of the ECB in every respect bar one.

It is funded by the ECB. The ECB, therefore, has only to keep the commission on a tight leash in terms of resources in order to tie one hand behind its back.

Limitless resources could lead to untold damage to English cricket in general, and to the ECB in particular, for allowing all this misbehaviour under its watch. For a governing body that has so far handled this harrowing episode with all the grace of a reversing dump truck, the thought of any further shame or embarrassment concocts the stuff of nightmares.

The five members of the panel are all great and good, and therefore have plenty of other work to do.

The chair, Cindy Butts, has a “portfolio career” which includes being a lay member of the House of Commons Speaker’s Committee for the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority. Are not her hands going to be full with Messrs Cox and Paterson?

If the ECB will not announce what the commission’s budget is, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport select committee needs to find out and judge if it is adequate. As the number of people wanting to submit evidence rocketed into four figures in the first couple of days, this commission is going to need a lot of researchers and other staff.

Perhaps the most important single issue is why Haringey Cricket College was closed in 1998, when it was producing so many Afro-caribbean cricketers, such as the most successful limited-overs county captain there has ever been, Mark Alleyne, and other fine cricketers such as Adrian Rollins and Keith Piper of England A (and it was giving them vocational training in the process).

The college’s closure effectively killed Afro-caribbean cricket in Britain. It is good that one of the five members is a former first-class cricketer, Zafar Ansari.

He can ask the right questions: why did Haringey CC players, when they went for county trials, usually bat at No11? Were they wanted only to bowl?

The batting order can be a form of discrimination: see how South Africa’s first black players all batted at No11.

The subtlest form of discrimination in English cricket, but arguably the most pernicious, was a result of the Level 3 coaching system. Pay a Level 3 coach £50 for an hour of coaching for your son, then lo and behold he is selected for the county’s age-group teams, as that Level 3 coach happened to be a county selector! Fortunately,

If it is done lock, stock and barrel, English cricket might regain its reputation for fairness

this equity commission will examine class as well as racism in cricket – the end result being that no England batsman has pinned down a regular Test place since Paul Collingwood without attending private school first.

Michael Carberry attended a school in Croydon which had to be closed: what chance did he have after fending off Mitchell Johnson in the 2013-14 Ashes as well as anyone? Dropped forever.

This commission must continue long after next summer until a complete survey of racism in English cricket has been done. Publish the immediate results and recommendations next year, but then go back to the beginning, to Learie (later Lord) Constantine being rejected as an overseas player by the Lancashire committee, and Charles Ollivierre not wanted by Derbyshire’s professionals in their dressing room.

If it is done lock, stock and barrel, English cricket might be able to regain its reputation for fairness, while so many walks of life have addressed the issue of racism by box-ticking alone.