Racism in cricket—whose liability?

• What legal remedies are available to Azeem Rafiq, whose promising career as a cricketer was held back by racist abuse?
• Suggests vicarious liability for negligence might be worth pursuing.

Cricket has featured heavily on the front pages of our national newspapers in the past year, and very much for the wrong reasons. The detailed and emotive testimony of Azeem Rafiq to the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) committee captivated and appalled observers. Rafiq described a catalogue of what was, on his account, patently racist abuse. That abuse, he says, left him, isolated, humiliated and battling with thoughts of taking his own life. His evidence portrayed a sport in which a culture of humiliation, intimidation and racism, generally passed off by its proponents and practitioners as workplace banter, had been endemic for so many years that it ran through establishments such as Yorkshire County Cricket Club (Yorkshire) like the writing on a stick of Blackpool rock.