The most powerful piece of sports broadcasting I can recall

NICK FRIEND: There was nothing to see but their faces, nothing to hear but their voices, nothing to feel but their sense of anger, injustice, emotion, desire for change. The focus was on nothing but their words, and they were heard loud and clear

As always, it was worth tuning in for Sky Sports’ coverage alone. Perhaps the most significant rain delay that cricket broadcasting has ever known. And frankly, just as well that there was no play before lunch. Quite simply, it couldn’t have competed with what the morning session instead provided.

For almost an hour, Michael Holding and Ebony Rainford-Brent held court – unfiltered, for the most part unprompted, unspeakably important throughout.

Talk alone is cheap, we often hear. But talk like this can only have a stirring impact on those watching at home and around the world. It was raw and impassioned, the release of years of pent-up frustration. Rainford-Brent was moved to tears in recalling the experiences of her upbringing in a city as multicultural as London. Holding was every bit as wise as has long been his calling card. When he speaks, you listen.

We have long admired Sky for their reporting of the game, for their finely tuned analysis, high-tech gimmicks and tremendous equilibrium of humour and cutting research. This, though, surpassed all that had come before; it was their tour de force – even the pre-programme montage struck all the right notes.

This was going to be a piece reflecting on quite what televised cricket might resemble in the coronavirus era. That can wait, this can’t. As Nasser Hussain pondered, audibly emotional: “We’ve all been looking away for too long.” He, too, has faced discrimination and abuse – the son of an Indian father and an English mother, a surname that made him a target.

This was sportscasting like no other – with racism unashamedly presented as it should be, not as a debate or a point for contest, but as an evil that needs rooting out of society. Arguments to the contrary were pulled apart as a public that had tuned in for England’s first Test in 163 days watched on in a vital silence that screamed more loudly than any word could possibly achieve, that surely had a greater impact than any morning session that came before.

Two segments swept through social media – one pre-recorded, the second filmed live on a concrete concourse at the Ageas Bowl amid a backdrop of persistent drizzle and empty stands.

The first part was shot in a dark room, with Holding and Rainford-Brent spotlighted in front of a black background. There was nothing to see but their faces, nothing to hear but their voices, nothing to feel but their sense of anger, injustice, emotion. The focus was on nothing but their words, and they were heard loud and clear.

If you do just one thing today. Please watch this from @SkyCricketpic.twitter.com/nAWLbpiTND

— The Cricketer (@TheCricketerMag) July 8, 2020

“Education is important unless we want to continue living the life that we are living and continue just having demonstrations every now and again and a few people just saying a few things,” Holding said, his powerful wisdom emanating through your television screen.

“When I say education,” he continued, “I mean going back in history. What people need to understand is that this thing stems from a long time ago, hundreds of years ago. The dehumanisation of the black race is where it started. People will say: ‘That’s a long time ago, get over it.’ No, you don’t get over things like that. And society has not gotten over something like that.”

On Tuesday, the ECB revealed a swathe of initiatives to improve diversity and inclusion in English cricket, with chief executive Tom Harrison speaking candidly about his own regrets of where the game has failed in the past.

“I think the reality is that maybe we’ve never cracked this challenge as a game in this country,” he admitted.

“This has been a time of huge reflection, not just our organisation but for me personally. I recognise that we are not where we should be as a sport and, admittedly, as a society too. I know that cricket can play a huge role in driving change way beyond these boundaries. I genuinely don’t think there is anything more important for us to do.”

Rainford-Brent, who launched the ACE (African-Caribbean Engagement) Programme with Surrey earlier this year, became England Women’s first black player when she made her ODI debut back in 2001. She was an unwitting trailblazer then, continuing in that capacity now more than ever.

Here, she spoke openly about how she initially struggled with that tag, embarrassed that she was the first. Her new initiative is all about doing her bit to correct a frightening imbalance. But like Holding, she implored those listening to take stock of the wider context.

“Unless you connect and understand what it feels like to be on the side of limited power in the world and to not be getting access to opportunities, to know that if you put in a CV and your name shows your ethnicity you are significantly less likely to be hired, you’re significantly more likely to be stopped and searched, until people in power understand and feel what it feels like to be oppressed, we won’t progress,” she stressed.

“I think it can’t be a ‘black person’s problem’. It has to be everyone’s problem – we have to want a society that is representative and supports people from different backgrounds. For me, that’s where it has to be honest conversations, opportunities, people in positions of power, and we can change the landscape.”

Throughout, Ian Ward’s words could be counted on one hand. His job was to listen. It should hardly come as a surprise, given the long-standing quality Sky’s cricket coverage and its pundits’ ability to so brilliantly nail the big moments. But it feels as though this might yet be the biggest: on a day when it would have been easier to welcome the world back to cricket with nostalgic footage from last year’s remarkable summer or with a feature around England’s stand-in captain or a tour of their bio-secure surroundings, they took this option – the right path, the most powerful path.

"Until we educate the entire human race, this thing will not stop." - Michael Holding

Incredibly important viewing.pic.twitter.com/FZWjd5HNw4

— The Cricketer (@TheCricketerMag) July 8, 2020

The world was watching today – the first sign of international cricket since Covid-19 took hold of the planet and locked down our game. On Sunday evening, almost six million people watched Southampton beat Manchester City in one of four free-to-air BBC Premier League matches. Some number, and a sign of quite how desperate we have all become for our fix. And while Test cricket behind a paywall will never come close to matching that figure, hundreds of thousands will have turned on this morning for some live action from the Ageas Bowl. More, almost certainly, than would have tuned in during a normal summer without home-working, home-schooling or furloughed cricket fans.

Each member of Sky’s team wore Black Lives Matter emblems on their jackets. Hussain, as so often, hit the nail on the head.

“The players should be proud of wearing these badges,” he said. “We should be proud of wearing these badges. But really, 2020 and we have to wear a badge saying Black Lives Matter? Really? That should be a given.”

Ward performed his role with aplomb; the presenter’s duty should always be to get the most from its guests, but rarely more so than this. He represented all of us: everyone who was watching and all those others who missed it but must be urged to catch up. Michael Vaughan tweeted soon afterwards that this was Holding’s “greatest delivery”. For sheer significance alone, this was bouncer, yorker, away-swinger and in-ducker all in one.

“Racism is taught,” he said. “No one is born a racist, but the environment in which you grow up, the society in which you live encourages and teaches racism.

“Everybody has heard about this lady in the park with her dog, who was asked by a black man in America to put her dog on a leash, which is the law. She threatened this black man with her whiteness, saying that she was going to call the police and tell the police that there is a black man threatening her. If the society in which she was living did not empower her or to get her to think that she had that power of being white and being able to call the police on a black man, she would not have done it. It’s a reaction, an automatic reaction because of the society in which she lives.

“That’s what I’m talking about teaching people. If you don’t educate people, they will keep growing up in that sort of society and you will not get meaningful change.

“Everyone is recognising it. Everyone is coming alive to it and seeing the difference in treatment in people. We are all human beings. I hope that people recognise that this Black Lives movement is not trying to get black people above white people or above anyone else. It’s all about equality.

“When you say to somebody that Black Lives Matter and they tell you that all lives matter or white lives matter, please, we black people know that lives matter. I don’t think you know that black lives matter. So, don’t shout back at us about all lives matter. It is obvious – the evidence is clearly there that white lives matter. We want black lives to matter now. Simple as that.”

The Cricketer is collaborating with The Voice in an effort to address cricket's racial diversity issue