Fresh furore underlines cricket's urgent need for diversity and governance reform

Middlesex chairman Mike O'Farrell's comments at the DCMS hearing caused a stir. He said football and rugby are more attractive to the African-Caribbean community and academia comes first for people of South Asian origin. DAREN MOOTOO responds

I am of Guyanese heritage. My parents arrived in England as part of the Windrush generation and I was born in leafy Wimbledon.

When I was just three, my parents moved to Essex, for reasons I've never had fully explained. We were the only non-white faces for 50 miles and growing up among West Ham-following National Front skinheads was both physically and emotionally painful. My cricket-loving dad enrolled me at the local cricket club, Billericay, when I was about 11. As kids hanging out on the local green, that was part of housing policy back then, we'd play football all winter, then cricket after the FA Cup final.

It was all the same kids, no one disappeared off if they didn't like cricket or football – we just liked to play sport together. Quite often, we'd be disturbed by teenage trouble-makers who would attack me and my brother for the colour of our skin and also berate my friends as traitors to their country for interacting with 'foreigners'.

It was around this time that the West Indies cricket team rose to greatness. For the first time, I really identified with my heritage, having tried so hard thus far to have behaved and spoke like an Essex youngster. Like many people who had come to England and suffered hardship and abuse, the march of Clive Lloyd's side gave me a sense of pride and identity in who I was.

I walked taller and felt I now had something with which to fight back. Suddenly it was cool to be West Indian and all cricket clubs from local, through county and up to England level were falling over themselves to recruit West Indian or West Indian-derived players, to play in that cavalier style that English cricketers were not accustomed to play.

^{County cricket needs to make improvements to its governance and diversity}

Roland Butcher and Norman Cowans appeared in the Test side in an attempt to fight fire with fire. It seemed every first-class county was also falling over itself to field black players – Norbert Philip, Monte Lynch, Keith Boyce and Sylvester Clarke, to name a few and at one stage, Middlesex had five black players in their squad.

This was a pattern that was to continue parallel to the West Indies domination of international cricket, well into the 1990s. But as that success waned, it seemed that kids of West Indian background in England had lost their role models. The glee on England faces as they dispatched heavier and heavier defeats on the West Indies was matched by the despondent looks on the Caribbean players. This despondency fed through to the domestic game. It was as if the crown has slipped and having a West Indian player in your side was no longer top of anyone's priorities. And barriers started to appear.

Mark Butcher's excellent documentary for Sky, You Guys Are History, recounted tales of discrimination and abuse felt by black English payers at the highest level.

West Indies players that went on rebel tours to South Africa were ostracised on their return and expelled from the game – and their islands, in some cases. By contrast the English players that took the Ali Bacher rand walked straight back to their counties and in some cases rose unhindered to the very top of the game. This is where interest from British kids of West Indian background starts to diminish.

The timing coincided with the explosion of football's Premier League and a big uptick in black players playing for top teams. The role models were now on the football pitch, not the cricket square.

"The interest in cricket from the West Indian community never went away, just that its enthusiasm had nowhere to go"

The pathways were easier. Black kids were welcome, in cricket they were being pushed away. The barriers to playing competitive cricket had gotten too high. It was easier to progress in football than cricket, no matter how cricket-mad you were. But the interest in cricket from the West Indian community never went away, just that its enthusiasm had nowhere to go.

It's a similar story with the Asian community, who feel that to this day there are glass ceilings that stop their progress. Go to any colts training session anywhere up and down the country and you will see a healthy contingent of Asian kids playing, but that tails off massively at 15 or 16 years old. It's not to focus on studies – that's a factor for all kids of that age group and not just exclusive to certain ethnic groups.

The feeling from UK Asians is that the racism, overt and implied, is not worth it. That's why there are so many independent Asian cricket leagues all over England. That is why there are so many wandering West Indian community teams, who travel around to play matches on recreation grounds and at municipal parks, because they feel excluded from the traditional set-up.

^{Cricket's pathways do not provide enough encouragement for minorities, says Daren Mootoo}

The only Asian kids that get welcomed in are those whose fathers are successful businessmen and clubs/counties see it as an opportunity to tap them for money. The state school/public school argument is an irrelevance for British Asian/West Indian kids, though the class argument is there, but for another day.

The real problem lies in the structure and governance of cricket. Almost exclusively, boards and committees at all first-class level are made up of old, white men. Men from another era, whose views are outdated and out of step.

They have no grasp of multi-culturalism, diversity or equal opportunity. Their views are prejudiced. When you hear a county chairman, Mike O'Farrell, speaking at a Digital, Culture, Media and Sport select committee hearing on the subject of racism in cricket, and hear him - without any sense of occasion - suggesting black people don't like cricket and Asians are too interested in academia, which worse still then goes unchallenged, you see the scale of the problem and why minorities feel excluded.

Is the battle worth the fight?

The interest and passion among Caribbean and Asian kids has never gone away, just look at the work being done by the ACE Foundation and all of the Asian cricket academies nationwide and you will see it is there, but nobody within the system bothers to tap into it.

The sooner there is more diversity at the ECB and in county boardrooms, only then will any meaningful progress be made.

Daren Mootoo is host of the radio show 98 Not Out, and chair of Billericay CC.