Former cricketer turned whistleblower Azeem Rafiq is on a round trip from the UAE to Britain that is taking him through the stages of his eventful life.
Aged just 33, he has twice felt compelled to flee his home country – first Pakistan, then England – due to fears for his family’s safety, but in his new Dubai home he at last feels “incredibly safe”.
At a lawyer’s office in London, where The National met him this week, Rafiq is promoting his new book, It’s Not Banter, It’s Racism, on the abuse that plagued his career and has reshaped his life.
While in England he even played some cricket again, belting a half-century in a charity game at the Hay-on-Wye book festival that was umpired by the actor and broadcaster Stephen Fry.
Where he is not going is back to Barnsley, the childhood home where he first tasted English cricket but now feels a pariah after exposing racism at Yorkshire’s venerated county cricket club.
“I went last summer and I was racially abused on the street. A person tried to start a fight with me,” he said. “That was pretty clear – up in those areas I’m not welcomed.”
Rafiq, a former spin bowler, shook the world of cricket in 2020 by going public with racism allegations against much-admired figures from Yorkshire and England.
It began a years-long saga of investigations and legal battles that eventually upheld Rafiq’s claims against several Yorkshire players, who referred to him with racial slurs.
Yorkshire admitted he was racially harassed, but denied there was a systemic problem or that decisions on Rafiq’s selection in the team were made for “anything other than cricketing reasons”.
One of Rafiq’s most high-profile claims, that former England captain Michael Vaughan told a group of Asian players there were “too many of you lot”, was found “not proved” by a disciplinary panel.
Move to Dubai
Dismayed by how cricket had seemed to close ranks, Rafiq began fearing for his own safety and that of his wife and young children. In 2022, they decided to leave Britain.
It was a feeling of deja vu for Rafiq, who had left Pakistan aged 10 after a business partner of his father was kidnapped and murdered. The family took a pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia before moving to England.
More than 20 years later, the family headed back to Pakistan but were waylaid when Rafiq’s father became ill in Dubai.
“I came to Dubai in December 2022 to look after my father, and we fell in love with the place. It’s been incredibly supportive to us, people have been full of warmth,” Rafiq tells The National.
With a golden visa to live in the UAE, he plans to stay in the Middle East and seek more work in the region after doing some cricket coverage for local media.
“Someone said to me very early on that whistleblowers never have a successful life after. I’m pretty determined to change that,” he said.
“When you get something like Dubai where you feel incredibly safe, you treasure it and hold on to it as long as you can.”
Rafiq’s decision to speak out in 2020 came at a moment of reflection on race in the wake of the George Floyd and Black Lives Matter protests around the world.
His ordeal had pushed his mental health to breaking point after the stillbirth of his son in 2018. In his new book, he describes contemplating suicide.
Despite much soul-searching in English cricket since then, Rafiq believes too little has changed for South Asian players, with a lack of diversity among bosses of the county game.
The fact that many people still turn to Rafiq to report their experiences in both grass roots and professional cricket suggests, he says, that there is “no system that they feel like they can report to and be safe”. Some related that their claims of racism had been laughed at by colleagues.
Rafiq’s book makes clear his disappointment at those who are not accused of overt racism but of failing to stand up for him. He mentions former England captain Joe Root, who said he did not witness racism at Yorkshire.
Calling out those he sees as bystanders is “hugely important, because actually that hurts me more”, Rafiq said. “When you are silent, you take the side of the oppressor,” he added in an echo of the famous quote about neutrality in situations of injustice made by the anti-apartheid activist Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu.
The response from those directly accused was mixed. Gary Ballance, a former batter who represented both England and Zimbabwe, made a public apology. The former England bowler Matthew Hoggard initially sought conciliation but later criticised the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) disciplinary hearings. Rafiq says some of those involved have chosen to “keep living in denial”.
He himself was caught in a racism storm when old Facebook posts were uncovered in which he had made derogatory remarks about Jews.
His response was to apologise, admit a disciplinary charge, speak to Jewish leaders to make amends, meet Holocaust survivors and even make a visit to Auschwitz, but he rejects the idea that he was trying to set an example for those he had accused.
“I was very clear that I would apologise without any 'what-aboutery', but that would only be the start. That’s what I wanted to do – not because I was asking other people, because that’s what I think is the right thing,” he said.
“The way the Jewish community have brought me in – I think I’d say they’re more the role model, the way they’ve put their arms around me. I hope people can look at that.”
As an England youngster, Rafiq played with the likes of Ben Stokes, Jos Buttler and Root, including at a Dubai training camp, but he never broke into the senior team.
The current England setup with Stokes as Test captain has been praised for looking after players’ mental health, including recent additions to the squad such as Rehan Ahmed and Shoaib Bashir.
Rafiq is cautious in his praise, saying the England camp seems to be a safe environment for now but that “time will tell whether that stays”.
Covert racism
Back in Yorkshire, he says South Asians are over-represented at grass roots level but are not often brought into key positions such as county chief executives and academy directors. Racism, he says, has merely become "more covert”.
“The ECB will talk about how they’ve got x per cent more people on the boards from minority groups. People on the boards don’t do anything. They’re going nowhere near a dressing room,” he said.
The academy director “is probably the most powerful person at your club” in terms of which young players progress, he said. “You have this thing in cricket of: ‘Oh, I like the look of him.' What does that even mean?
“I’ve heard academy directors say things like: ‘He prays too much.’ These are views that are openly expressed. By cricket’s response currently, you can see these are the views that they want to stay with.”
It is a similar gap to one facing Muslim girls in grass roots football, as described by anti-racism campaigners The Three Hijabis who Rafiq knows and who The National recently met at Wembley.
Still, for all that cricket has made him suffer, he cannot wipe a smile from his face as he describes playing in the charity match in Hay and the little things that reminded him of his love for the game.
Even after retiring from cricket and leaving Britain for fear of abuse, he fondly remembers the grass, the dressing rooms, the pitches, “everything about the English summer”.
“I’m not going to lose the love of the game,” he said. “Why should I leave my space in the game because of the racists?”
'It’s Not Banter, It’s Racism: What Cricket’s Dirty Secret Reveals About Our Society' (Trapeze, £22), by Azeem Rafiq, is published in hardback today.
