Breaking boundaries - the inside story of cricket's ICEC report

England’s first Test Match against the West Indies in July 2020 was a strange match at a strange time. The teams met in the depths of the pandemic, behind closed doors in Southampton’s Rose Bowl stadium, after the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) had confirmed no professional cricket at all would be played in the months prior. 

There was no crowd; there were nearly no players either. Without vaccines, safety concerns were to the fore. England’s players and fans would praise the West Indians for making what opening bowler Jimmy Anderson described as a ‘scary’ decision to visit.

The series also coincided with the peak of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement’s prominence in Britain. Protests in the US over the death of George Floyd had spread to the UK: a few weeks earlier, the statue of Edward Colston had been toppled in Bristol. 

For some this was little more than mass hysteria: the young, bored and woke latching on to an indistinct cultural cause that meant little. For others, lockdown had made us slow down, incline more to empathy; reach a moment of social progress. Either way, apart from the virus, racism – institutional or otherwise – felt like the only talking point in the country. 

Sky Sports decided to lean into the subject. In a video package, Michael Holding – a 66-year-old commentator who had once been one of the West Indies’ greatest ever bowlers, and Ebony Rainford-Brent, the first Black woman to play for England, spoke in a video package about their experiences of racism. 

A defining moment followed. “Without the weather. I don't know if it would have happened,” says Vithushan Ehantharajah, Associate Editor at ESPNCricinfo.

On the first morning of the Test, rain fell. There was no play, and during a discussion in the delay, Holding went on to address his co-commentators for a near-unbroken four minutes and 45 seconds.

He talked about how the public’s ignorance of Lewis Howard Latimer – the inventor of the carbon filament lightbulb – was emblematic of a failure within the education system to celebrate Black success. His voice cracked as he went on to discuss the prejudice he’d seen other Black people face. 

It wasn’t the analysis of batting line ups the viewers had perhaps tuned in for. But on social media, the reaction was positive. Footage of the speech went viral, and received near-unanimous praise: it was even deemed “spellbinding” by the Telegraph. 

The clip cut through far beyond the cricketing world. Within the game itself, something had cracked. An initial acceptance on the part of the English Cricket Board’s (ECB’s) chief executive that the sport had “very difficult truths to face” about the way the game had excluded the African-Caribbean community, soon became a wider call to action.

For Kate Miller, the ECB’s chief communications officer, work had started some years before. The board’s 2017 deal with Sky Sports had brought money into the game and allowed it to draw up a strategy called Inspiring Generations: it lacked insight, but was a tentative bid to transform the women and girl’s game, and bring in more communities. “What we didn’t know at the time… was the depth of discrimination across the sport,” she says. 

Miller adds that, for the ECB, a further tipping point was a podcast interview given slightly earlier in 2020 by the Black former English opening batsman Michael Carberry, who said he’d retired because he was tired of being seen as “the angry black man” in a sport where white people held power. “The way that… [he] still is in huge pain years later… that was the point at which at which our heads really began to be turned”.

A final important detail was the professional background of the ECB’s chairman at the time. Ian Watmore, who served until October 2021, had previously been a civil servant under three prime ministers. For him, the only way to handle a difficult issue like this was a time-honoured central governance procedure: an independent commission.

“I think what they probably realised,” says Ehantharajah, “is that they didn't have the expertise, and they quite literally didn't have the people to wade through it all.”

And so a specific set of circumstances led to a surprising and, by the standards of sports leadership, brave, decision. The following March, the ECB set up the Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket (ICEC) to “evaluate the state of equity in cricket and expose the realities of people’s experiences within cricket.” 

---

One morning in 2021, Cindy Butts was lying in bed and listening to a Radio 4 report about an employment tribunal involving two professional umpires, John Holder and Ismael Dawood, who were alleging racial discrimination. She thought the ECB could do with her help. After a meeting, the board encouraged her to apply for the vacancy to chair the recently-announced commission. She got the job.

Her appointment was not without pushback from the political right due to the list of social justice roles on her CV. Among others, she was a former deputy chair of the Metropolitan Police Authority, where she’d led on organisational reforms after the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry. She told The House she was getting hate mail from the moment she was appointed: “Woke warrior… Labour sympathiser”.

Her experience of the game received less attention. Butts grew up with cricket in her blood: her grandfather had been a recreational player, one cousin had been a Test player and others had played at county level: “Mum exposed me to cricket: she’d take us to Lords, she’d take us to the Oval.. she’d spend hours watching Test cricket [lamenting] the [time] lost not doing housework, vowing the next day not to do it again”.

The opening stages were all about laying down the law to the ECB, she says: “I was really keen to understand that we had a good trusting relationship between ourselves, but the line had to be drawn very clearly in terms of respecting our independence… I was very clear that I was going to appoint my own commissioners, my own secretariat staff.” 

Butts says her vision for the commissioners she wanted was clear: among other things, a deep knowledge of cricket, and an awareness of how to effect cultural change. She chose Brendan Barber, the former TUC secretary general, Zafar Ansari, who’d retired from a glittering professional cricket career to become a lawyer, Michelle Moore, a leadership coach with a long track record in public administration, and Michael Collins, a UCL history professor. This last appointment was important: Butts didn’t just want to understand how things might have gone wrong; but why.

She had wanted people who would work for 12 months, but soon, something would happen to make this a far bigger project than she’d planned.

---

While the ICEC was launching its survey, a cricketer named Azeem Rafiq gave evidence to the DCMS select committee. Years earlier, he had spoken about his experiences of racism at Yorkshire Cricket Club, before launching an employment tribunal. A formal investigation had found “inappropriate behaviour”, but no action was taken against staff or players. 

Rafiq’s emotional testimony was commended by the committee’s chair, who praised his “bravery in speaking out”. A deluge of written evidence to the ICEC followed. It drastically increased the scope of the report. 

In spite of the appalling evidence Miller says the ECB still didn’t really understand the scale of what was coming: “I don’t think we had a view that… it was so seismic and cultural… that it was so embedded.”

Whether or not the fallout from the Rafiq story was the catalyst, several sources told The House that as the ICEC process progressed, panic began to grip the ECB over the scale of what was about to be exposed, and the cost of the measures that would have to be implemented as a result. 

“I think that’s always a concern, isn’t it? When you know that your sport needs transformation,” says Miller. “We’re not a wealthy sport… our annual revenues are less than Tottenham Hotspur’s and we run the game from top to bottom: we’ve got to fund [England captains] Ben Stokes’ and Heather Knight’s salaries, as well as ensuring that cricket clubs in rural Lancashire are getting funding for their women and girls’ changing rooms.”

Whether born of this pressure or not, bumps began to appear in the road. One flashpoint occurred when Butts read, to her horror, media reports that the ECB was trying to woo her to join its board: “There I was, alongside Baroness Warsi, our faces splashed on the articles.… I was most upset and I picked up the phone to Richard [Thompson, by then ECB Chair] to say so, and encouraged him to shut down any such suggestion. I didn’t want it to interfere with our independence... Even post inquiry I wouldn’t have done it… I think it would undermine what we’ve done.”

A further sticking point occurred in the final weeks leading up to the report’s publication. Upon receiving a draft copy, the ECB took the decision to respond to some points via defamation lawyers, giving rise to the extraordinary possibility the institution could end up taking legal action against the independent commission it had established to look into itself. The ECB said the back-and-forth was only about ensuring accuracy and was not an attempt to water down the report. Butts declined to comment on the nature of the discussions. 

“Weirdly… I quite like the friction there,” says Ehantharajah. “I mean, it had to be a difficult process doing that kind of stuff. And there should be a lot of looking over your shoulder.” He had tried to break numerous stories about racism prior to the report. Players had seen the abuse Rafiq was getting, and backed away. He was pleased to learn they were, however, talking to the ICEC.

---

The final report, published in June 2023, was a thunderbolt, in which the bare statistics spoke as loudly as the findings. 

It told the story of a sport loved by the many, but which had failed the many. In lieu of proper facilities and training for all, cricket had bound up its elite pathways – the county youth teams and coaching set ups through which kids could pass on their journey to become professions – with the private school system, and crossed its fingers that the bursaries it could offer would constitute enough of a meritocracy to provide a professional talent base fit for the world stage. 

Just under two thirds of the England squad were privately educated in 2021: “significantly higher than the 7 per cent of the general population who are privately educated”. Indeed, private school players were thirteen times more likely to become pro than those in state schools. This private school dominance, the report said, needed to be tackled urgently in the men’s game; but the women’s game could easily sleepwalk into exactly the same problems.

This monstrously unfair system had worked, up to a point. England could hold its own at an international level. But the image of a healthy sport suggested by the performances of its superstars on TV was a chimera. Those not in the pathway, struggled to play at all.

Both white working class children and those from minority backgrounds faced huge barriers to inclusion: “The scarce provision of cricket in state schools, the widespread links between cricket and private schools, the cost and time associated with playing youth cricket, the lack of a systematic, contextual process for talent identification, and the relative absence of diversity amongst coaches on the talent pathway: these are all important factors which present significant barriers to an equitable system.” 

Given such a system, what the report had to say on race was hardly surprising. It described the evidence from its 4,000 submissions of evidence as “unequivocal”; “Racism, in all its forms, continues to shape the experience of, and opportunities for, many in the game.”

“All the stories that Azeem Rafiq talks about, that all happened to me. All the abuse, the isolation, the hatred. [Teammates] poured alcohol on me. They threw bacon sandwiches at me. I have lived with all that and never spoke to anyone about it,” one Muslim player was quoted as saying.

“I found many of the victims’ stories… harrowing,” says Miller. “I was surprised at how awful the experiences of some people had been in the game… and ashamed.” 

It’s rare for club cricketers in the UK not to play alongside or against players from a South Asian background. But the report found that despite them making up nearly a third of the adult recreational population, they made up less than three per cent of senior leaders. 

For Ehantharajah, the fact the report showed how “toxic” the professional game had become was eye-opening. A retired Asian player told him that racism had got worse throughout his career due to the declining number of ethnic minority players: “No one used to say that my uncle drove a taxi. But now players might say: my uncle drives an Uber.”

The picture was even bleaker when it came to Black communities. The report was clear that the game had failed to engage with people, particularly of Caribbean descent, for whom there had been a rich seam of interest due to the all-conquering West Indies team of the 1980s. Black participation was so low as to be statistically irrelevant. Many respondents pinpointed the closure of Haringey Cricket College, in 1997, as “pivotal”. 

On women’s cricket, the findings were no better. The figures around pay were stunning: the report found professional women cricketers’ pay to be around a third of men’s pay, and only 15 per cent for tests. This discrepancy was mirrored on equipment and facilities. 

Despite a rapidly growing fanbase, women were second class citizens. Just as structural discrepancies begat racism, so “a prevalent culture of sexism” was revealed. One example in particular cut through in terms of the resulting coverage: the fact that Eton and Harrow had played each other at Lord’s every year, while England’s women had never played a Test there, and had indeed only played there once since winning the 2017 World Cup. 

Thompson described the situation as “unacceptable” and pledged a women’s Test in 2026: but the ECB pointed out the situation was due to the Marylebone Cricket Club, the private members’ club that owns Lord’s. 

Butts describes the situation as a “disgrace”. She said: “I respect that it’s not their decision, that it’s a member-led organisation. But I think it is really important that the ECB engages with the MCC [and] makes a case, and is publicly seen to be doing so… They can’t mandate it. But they can make their views known, and strongly.”

She adds: “No one goes to that match, no one bloody turns up!... We’re not anti-tradition; I’ve never been anti-tradition for the sake of it, but [when] those traditions… prevent the game from being inclusive, welcoming, meritocratic, where it allows inequalities to fester: that’s when traditions have had their day.”

---

Miller knew there would be a huge reaction to the report, but says the ECB wasn’t worried about a negative reaction from the political right. “I actually think our role as a national governing body is to be values-led, and not to be waylaid by political factions or political affinities. Our job is to do what we think is the right thing and not worry too much about that noise.” 

Ehantharajah notes that the report even mentions “wokeness” early on. “It’s almost like – if you think this is woke, then get out of the way and do something else with your time,” he says. “I thought it landed really well… it gave a few punchy headlines, [but] it offered solutions as well,” he adds.

The body did, however, get its main stakeholders on board. Ben Stokes, the England men’s captain, gave an unexpectedly powerful speech about how the game should be enjoyed without “fear of discrimination or judgment, whether that be due to your upbringing, race or gender.”

“Our press team couldn’t cope… we started a national conversation.”

He went on to describe himself as “a state-educated pupil who dropped out of school at 16 with one GCSE in PE,” adding “I needed help with the spelling and grammar in this speech and I am currently sitting here as the England men's Test captain.”

England women’s captain Heather Knight said: "I started out playing men's club cricket and being asked: 'Do you do the ironing for the men when you're finished?' 

“To all of us, it hasn't been a surprise what's been in there, about women's sport in particular,” she added.

Butts knew her team had produced something “special”: “I knew I had assembled a really special team of commissioners and staff… the depth of their experience, the ambition that I’d set them, that they were willing to take up… but I never imagined the reaction.” She described it as “overwhelming… our press team couldn’t cope.”

Discussion of the report, she said , went well beyond cricket: ”Talk shows talking about class, elitism… we started a national conversation.”

The Times deemed the report a “troubling” wake up call. The Telegraph described it as a “scathing rebuke of ECB governance” and said it could not be dismissed as “wokeness”. Wisden described it as a “sober, and sobering, piece of work,” that “deserved respect, not ridicule”. 

Soon enough, even Rishi Sunak was on Test Match Special, describing it as “a reset moment” for the sport. Most heartening, says Butts, were the people who had submitted evidence: “The people who contacted us [saying] “thank you - we see ourselves reflected in the report.”

Still, there was online abuse, on social media, and more through the ICEC’s website. Butts reads some of it to The House: comments describing her as a porn star, others saying: “Cindy Butts has predictably made white people apologise for institutional racism… as a nation we must be the laughing stock of the world.”

But within the game any backlash to the report was muted. Only one significant figure in the game spoke out: Lord Ian Botham, the chair of Durham County Cricket Club who said he threw his copy on the floor after reading a “complete and utter waste of money”. 

Butts feels the ECB should have “shown moral backbone” over his comments and spoken up: “My phone was off the hook with Black and Asian [cricketers] and women concerned this individual was undermining the report and their experiences.”

However, Miller feels not engaging publicly was the right call: “If the national body comes out and makes a big statement, what gets generated? More headlines about what Lord Botham’s views are… our attention is better focussed on actually making change.” 

There was pushback on our report… how could the ECB have allowed us to say what we said?

Kate Aldridge, the ECB’s EDI director, tells The House that irrespective of Botham’s views, Durham, the club he chairs, has done some “incredible work” around its equality and diversity action plan: “they do a lot of really strong community work, particularly around socio economic backgrounds.”

At a meeting of Parliament’s APPG for cricket in July, Richard Gould and Clare Connor, the chief executive and deputy chief executive of the ECB respectively, were lambasted by Tory MPs who claimed they had “lost control”. Butts was told the meeting was “extremely heated and hostile…There was pushback on our report… how could the ECB have allowed us to say what we said?”

Did the ECB care? “No,” says Miller. “The only place we can occupy is to create strong values… to aim to be the most inclusive team sport: everybody will have a view on that, but it doesn’t matter… If we keep steering in that direction, the outcomes will be positive for everybody.”

---

The ECB, for its part, went on to apologise “unreservedly” for the experiences of those who had faced discrimination in cricket. Then the work began. One of the most valuable things about the report, says Aldridge, was the way it “considered the intersections of the different communities that they were talking to, and interwove quite philosophical discussions around structures and institutions with personal anecdotes, personal stories… that broad picture of the game was almost like a tapestry to build from.”

The ECB published a substantive response which set out its approach, but did not provide a detailed response to each recommendation. The ICEC wanted significant changes, for example, to talent pathways, so that they were more meritocratic and free of direct costs. The ECB says this can’t happen yet. 

Butts describes it as “an unacceptable barrier”: “I’m really disappointed. It’s such a fundamental issue… opening up access to [working class] white lads, girls, people from the Black and Asian community. I actually think cricket will never be available until they… make access to the talent pathway free.” 

Will it ever? “Who knows?” says Miller. “Our vision is to make sure that cost is no barrier to being on the pathway… that’s a good achievable aim in the short term.” She goes on: “Ensuring that if you are a young person, [who] cannot access the talent pathway for affordability reasons… that does not restrict you: I’m struggling to understand how that doesn’t add up to a similar philosophy.”

Butts, however, is unpersuaded: “I think the rationale for not doing it is really flimsy. They don’t think they should be subsidizing families who can afford it… [but people] don’t apply for hardship funds because of the stigma.” 

She adds: “They say certain counties rely on the talent pathways for revenue funds: my argument is which of the first class counties would have difficulty if the talent pathway was free… and how do they work with those first class counties to ensure they are not solely dependent on the revenues?”

An ECB source says the focus is not just on money, but the structure and leadership of the talent pathways; the body is working with its partners to deliver cricket in state schools and make sure a more diverse contingent break through. This month Ben Stokes coached in a primary school in Newcastle; this session was ECB-funded, but delivered by two charities. 

However, there’s a clear sense of frustration that only so much can be achieved at the top of the funnel without government support: the ECB no doubt agrees with Keir Starmer, who in April pointed to a damaging decline in PE hours in state schools. 

On Black people’s engagement with cricket, the ECB is proud of its recent work, in expanding its relationship with the ACE programme (a scheme launched by Surrey County Cricket Club in 2020 in response to the decline of black players), as well as its core cities programme and work with former England bowler Devon Malcolm, now the ECB’s Black Communities Cricket Liaison Officer. “We need to rebuild trust with the black cricket community, and Devon is an incredibly respected voice and an amazing role model,” says Miller.

However, Butts would like to see a Black cricket action plan too. As she points out, the ECB accepts it has “lost a generation of black cricketers… [it’s] shameful.” The House understands the ECB will set out specific actions later this year.

She does accept good strides have been made in terms of the women’s game: “Equalizing match fees, restructuring women’s teams, increased salaries for women playing in The Hundred… these are all really important things to turbocharge women’s cricket.” 

However, she would like to see quicker progress on gender pay parity. She has little time for the ECB’s excuses in this area: “I don’t buy it. Women have been playing cricket for as long as cricket has existed…The reason why women’s cricket doesn’t generate the revenue is because it’s been underinvested in. Build it, and people will come.” She cites figures showing 110,000 fans attended the 2023 Women’s Ashes, a 450 per cent increase on the gate for the 2019 series.

The ECB’s official line is that it needs to do more analysis before it can commit. Ehantharajah says he doesn’t see it happening “any time soon… it’s the domestic circuit that seems to me to be a massive stumbling block…Certain clubs won't be willing to follow up the same kind of cash there.”

Miller says: “I’m not defending history, I think we all realise it wasn’t right.” She says progress has been made, not just on pay, but on less spoken-about elements like science: in May Nat Sciver-Brunt, a top England cricketer, revealed she’d missed a game due to having egg freezing treatment. “That wouldn't have happened without the support and understanding of brilliant people working within our science function as well.” 

---

Ultimately the ECB took a brave decision, and came out stronger for it. In April, Sunak announced an investment of £35 million in grassroots cricket facilities and widening access to the sport. There’s a belief within the ECB that without the ICEC, it would not have happened. Could other sporting institutions afford to follow their lead? They believe so.

Miller says if the administrator has any regrets, it’s actually that the ICEC could have gone even further looking at other groups; “people with disabilities, the LGBTQ+ community… Regret may be too strong a word, but I wish we’d found a way to reflect their experiences.” Aldridge says the ECB is now looking at those issues along with the areas the ICEC focussed on, and using recommendations from the report to do so.

At a recent select committee hearing, Richard Thompson described the aim for cricket to be the most inclusive team sport in the country as his “North Star”. Does Butts believe him? 

There is a long pause. “I believe him… the achievement of that mission isn’t going to be easy… When the journalists stop writing, and the cameras stop rolling, and the media attention shifts: that’s when it matters. Is the commitment still there?... He will be judged on this ambition, and I hope when he steps away, he will be judged favourably.”

PoliticsHome Newsletters

Get the inside track on what MPs and Peers are talking about. Sign up to The House's morning email for the latest insight and reaction from Parliamentarians, policy-makers and organisations.