LONDON: English county cricket club Essex have been fined £50,000 ($61,500) and reprimanded following a racist remark made by their former chairman, the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) announced Thursday.
The county admitted John Faragher used the highly offensive term during a board meeting in 2017 and accepted they had failed to hold a timely investigation into the matter.
Faragher, who resigned last November, has denied using the phrase.
An independent cricket discipline panel concluded that a points deduction would be inappropriate and instead settled on a financial penalty, of which £15,000 has been suspended.
The incidents at Essex, based in Chelmsford, came to light following the Azeem Rafiq racism scandal.
The former spinner told a parliamentary committee in November about the abuse he suffered while playing for Yorkshire, saying he had been driven to thoughts of suicide.
His revelations led to a mass clear out of senior boardroom figures and coaching staff at Yorkshire, as well as leading to the unearthing of racist incidents at several other first-class counties.
The independent panel looking into the Essex case praised John Stephenson, the Essex chief executive and interim chairman, for attempting to tackle the situation on his appointment last year but added he had been hampered by “a lamentable logjam at board level.”
The panel said: “The use of racist and discriminatory language such as this is plainly unacceptable — its utterance by a club chair is all the more deplorable.”
Essex said in a statement they had a “zero-tolerance policy toward racism and any form of discrimination” and were working to implement the ECB’s 12-point anti-discrimination plan drawn up in response to Rafiq’s revelations.
English cricket team Essex fined for racism by official
https://arab.news/5bz2g
English cricket team Essex fined for racism by official
- The county admitted John Faragher used the highly offensive term during a board meeting in 2017
- Faragher, who resigned last November, has denied using the phrase
Trump said Iran ‘welcome to compete’ in World Cup, says Infantino
US President Donald Trump has said that Iran is “welcome” to participate at the upcoming World Cup in North America, despite the ongoing Middle East war, FIFA chief Gianni Infantino said on Wednesday.
The war, triggered by US-Israeli strikes on February 28, has thrown into doubt Iran’s participation at this summer’s men’s football World Cup, jointly hosted by Canada, Mexico and the United States.
During a meeting to discuss preparations for the competition, “we also spoke about the current situation in Iran,” Infantino, the head of world football’s governing body, wrote on Instagram.
“During the discussions, President Trump reiterated that the Iranian team is, of course, welcome to compete in the tournament in the United States,” he wrote.
The comments marked the first time that Infantino, who in December created a FIFA peace prize and awarded it to Trump, has acknowledged the ongoing war in the Middle East.
Trump’s remarks to Infantino are a stark contrast to his comments to Politico last week.
Trump told Politico: “I really don’t care” if Iran play at the World Cup.
FIFA’s president has grown close to Trump since he returned to the White House, even attending his inauguration.
Asylum claims
Iran’s federation football chief on Tuesday cast doubt on his team’s participation in the sporting extravaganza, following the defection of several women footballers from the Islamic republic during the Asian Cup in Australia.
“If the World Cup is like this, who in their right mind would send their national team to a place like this?” Mehdi Taj asked on Iranian state television.
While the event is spread out across three countries, Iran are scheduled to play all three group games in the United States, two in Los Angeles and one in Seattle.
Should Iran withdraw from the sport’s quadrennial showpiece, it would be the first time a country did that since France and India pulled out of the 1950 finals in Brazil.
On Tuesday, at the Women’s Asian Cup in Australia, some players from Iran’s team claimed asylum after they came under fire from state television for not singing the country’s national anthem before one match.
Five players, including captain Zahra Ghanbari, slipped away from the team hotel under the cover of darkness to claim sanctuary from Australian officials, the Australian government announced.
At least two more team members applied to stay later in the day, according to local media.
However, Australia’s Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said on Wednesday that one of them had subsequently changed her mind.
Burke said in parliament on Wednesday that he had since been advised that one of the group “had spoken to some of the team mates that left and changed their mind.”
“She had been advised by her team mates and encouraged to contact the Iranian embassy,” he said.
“As a result of that, it meant the Iranian embassy now knew the location of where everybody was.”
The remaining players have been moved from a safe house to another location, he said.
