At the Hay Festival to talk about what the event’s website calls cricket’s ‘systemic biases’, famous comedian Stephen Fry said of the MCC: “It has a deeply disturbing public face, like beetroot-coloured gentlemen. and the orange jackets that sit in this area in front of the Long Room, looking like something out of an Edwardian cartoon.” We must wait to see how the club members react to being described in this way by Mr Fry – for my part, as I don’t own a club jacket (which is admittedly a bit of a killer). They compare the seizure to a bug) and since I’m not particularly beet I felt like he was talking about someone else But some of my fellow members won’t be too amused and will wonder what Mr. Fry is doing.
In any club, it is not just bad behavior for someone to publicly attack other members; It is an even greater insult when you are a man whom the club had deemed worthy of the honor of becoming president just two years ago. Mr Fry said he felt the club reeked of ‘exclusivity and classicism’, as if we MCCers were sitting in the stands and chatting to each other in Latin about our fields. It would be superficial to ask why Mr. Fry (an extremely intelligent man I know and admire) agreed to become a member of a club he found so despicable, let alone become president. He must realize that he is acting in a prejudiced manner by caricaturing his membership. He is as stupid as those who take one person of a different race as an example and attribute all kinds of flaws to everyone of another race. I imagine Mr Fry would be upset by such an ignorant attitude, and so it is little wonder that people are upset by his remarks about his fellow MCC members.
His apparently self-loathing observations emerged in a debate triggered by the imminent publication of Azeem Rafiq’s book, which caused an earthquake in Yorkshire and accused various former teammates there of racism; My colleague Michael Vaughan couldn’t do anything about it either. Let it be proven. Only Gary Ballance acknowledged his bad behavior and apologized. Hay’s website trumpets the Independent Equality Commission report in cricket; This report was (as seen by its composition) a form of self-fulfilling prophecy, concluding (in the words of the festival) that ‘cricket is rife with structural and institutional racism, sexism’. , classism and elitism.’ Also on the panel was former England women’s cricketer Claire Taylor.
No one supports or defends racism in cricket and anyone found practicing racism at any level of the game should be banned from the club immediately. The same hatred apparently does not exist towards those who want to denigrate someone’s class (middle and above, oriented towards professions), gender (male), age (also middle and above) and educational attainment (elite). As Mr Fry knew, very few people had a say. MCC is a club of a particular demographic because it is people from that demographic who have been playing cricket predominantly for the last 30 or 40 years, thanks to the near destruction of the public school system by those whose policies have been adopted by militant anti-racists. in sympathy.
Naming MCC members perhaps earned Hay a cheap laugh from Mr Fry’s guilt-ridden elite friends, but it does nothing to heal cricket’s self-inflicted wounds. The main barriers to ‘getting involved’ in MCC are not racism, elitism and classism, but a 25-year waiting list and high annual subscription. At least Rafiq had the decency to say that the main people who supported him when he made his accusations were ‘middle-aged white men’; However, some of these accusations did not hold up. Rafiq himself was also exposed for his anti-Semitic tweets, showing that even he is not perfect when it comes to matters of race. His book is eagerly awaited, but perhaps not for the reasons he would like, and various lawyers of his former colleagues are also watching.
It seems even the England and Wales Cricket Board has decided that more harm than good has been done to the game by a witch hunt for so-called ‘racists’. The charges in Essex were dismissed; Yorkshire are still not fully back on their feet despite serious rescue efforts by former MCC chairman Philip Hodson and former ECB chief Colin Graves, and the political posturing and virtue signaling of anyone prominent in the game is utterly devastating. The sooner those with a high profile in the game stop looking for reasons to flog themselves about race and start making a constructive effort to ensure that everyone in the cricket world gets along and behaves decently towards each other, the better.