The row over racism at Yorkshire County Cricket Club has also shone a spotlight on anti-Semitism in the cricketing world. Andrew Gale, the Yorkshire head coach and former captain, has been suspended for having sent a tweet which said: ‘button it, yid’.
Azeem Rafiq, the former Yorkshire spin-bowler who blew the whistle on racism, was found to have sent a Facebook message in which he labelled a fellow cricketer as a ‘Jew’ for being reluctant to spend money at a team dinner, and went on to assert: ‘Only Jews do (that) sort of shit ha’.
The comedian Mike Yarwood once quipped: ‘I was doing the smallest books in the world. Famous Jewish cricketers, Australian etiquette, that kind of thing.’ Yet despite the absence of many top-level Jewish cricketers – or perhaps because of it – there’s a long history of anti-Semitism in the sport
Fast bowler Norman Gordon was the first openly Jewish South African Test cricketer.
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