Today Harry Turnbull comments on the dire situation at Headingley. Please be careful what you say in the comments. Ta.

As a Lancastrian, you won’t expect me to be weeping into meThwaites beer over events int badlands…

There has been a nasty taste in me piehole ever since a senior Tyke was heard calling Ashwell Prince a fkn kolpak. It was said with such wicked malice you couldn’t help wonder what other vicious thoughts lay hidden and unsaid.

There has been a collective chip on the shoulder of some Yorkist dinosaurs since Satan’s own county was forced to abandon the discriminatory place of birth rule.

I played Cricket with people of various backgrounds and the thought even in the 80s of calling someone a P word was unthinkable.

No doubt there will be more to come and it’s about time this sewage was brought out into the open for a public examination.

Now I’m not just gleefully dancing on the grave of Yorkshire, this issue won’t just be confined to that county. Administrators, executives and players should all come under scrutiny.

The trouble with many organisations is the lip-service paid to inclusion in their jargonised, high-falutin mission statements.

Lancashire is a prime example. The work on preparing diversity and inclusion policies is painstaking. Even though board members are now more diverse it often seems like an exercise in box ticking rather than heartfelt change throughout the organisation.

These clubs and the ECB remain largely the domain of a certain echelon of society.

And it’s hard to figure out why. Lancashire, like Yorkshire, has a large Asian community who love cricket. Why on earth isn’t this tapped into more? Sure we have Mahmood and recently Haseeb Hameed but it’s barely scratching the surface.

I feel that the policies of elite player pathways and supporting largely middle-class cricket clubs is missing out on a rich seam of talent.

More ethnically diverse staffs would help and crucially cricket development in inner city state schools.

I still hope the Yorkies get the biggest clobbering since the Battle of Bosworth though!

Harry Turnburn

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