Haringey was not simply a place for playing cricket: all students gained a NVQ because the inspirational head coach Reg Scarlett insisted. By 2021 the proportion of Asian and black male county cricketers, all together, was down to 8.1 per cent. Yet it was allowed to die through sheer meanness, pettiness and, it can be argued, racism. The UK Sport Council called it “the most successful Sport Academy in the world”: by the mid-1990s there were 33 county cricketers of Caribbean origin and 15 were Haringey graduates. The single biggest sin by English cricket, in my opinion, was to let Haringey Cricket College close. Such a conclusion as this one seems undeniable: “3.8.11 Historically, established elites have consistently limited access to the game for the working classes, for women and for players from ethnically diverse communities.” Overall, the Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket report into all forms of discrimination in English cricket is insightful and balanced, not a splenetic rant. “Black people are not important to the structure of English cricket,” he said, retiring prematurely after growing tired of being seen as “the angry black man”. In 2020, Carberry spoke out against the dressing-room culture he experienced. They have tried a dozen Test openers since, and all of them were given more chances than Carberry, 33, who was up with Johnson’s pace: he got out in his last innings only because he tried an upper cut after all the other batsmen had been blown away at the other end.Ĭarberry should have been picked for the one-day series that followed, as the form batsman in white-ball domestic cricket, but again he was not given a fair chance. A decade later it is not as if England have found an opening batsman to succeed Cook and Sir Andrew Strauss. Yet the last black England-born player was the only batsman on that tour never selected to play a Test for England again. In that series dominated by Mitchell Johnson, Carberry scored more runs than Cook, more indeed than any England player except Kevin Pietersen, who made only 13 more. In the warm-up against Australia A, both of them scored 150. Michael Carberry went to Australia in 2013-14, after one Test appearance, as Alastair Cook’s opening partner. A minute’s silence at Lord’s before the start of the second Test between England and Australia would be appropriate: to commemorate all the careers of non-white cricketers who have gone to waste in Britain.

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