Does cricket suffer from ‘institutional racism’?

What a strange document the Independent Commission on Equity in Cricket (ICEC) has produced, in its ‘Holding up a mirror to cricket’ report. Rambling, explicitly political, antagonistic and poorly-argued, it ignores some obvious explanations for the ills it discusses, and fixates on irrelevancies. The authors situate their conclusions within the world of intersectionality and other well-worn academic buzzwords. This limits the usefulness of its conclusions because every problem is shoehorned into a particular framework, rather than being carefully considered on its own terms.

Take, for example, the identification of a severe decline in cricket participation by black Britons. ‘Holding up a mirror to cricket’ ascribes this decline to various causes, but an obvious structural reason – namely, the changing composition of the black British population – is not even considered. Two or three decades ago most black Britons had Afro-Caribbean heritage. Nowadays black Britons increasingly have backgrounds in places like West Africa, where cricket is relatively unpopular compared to the West Indies – and even in the West Indies the popularity of cricket is not what it once was.