County cricket

Yorkshire county cricket club have confirmed that they will launch a formal independent investigation into allegations of "institutional racism" made by their former spinner Azeem Rafiq.

Rafiq, who played for Yorkshire between 2008 and 2018, in a recent interview to ESPNcricinfo, claimed that the abuse he suffered left him close to committing suicide and that his reports of racist abuse were "ignored" by the club at the time. "Yorkshire don't want to listen and they don't want to change," Rafiq told ESPNcricinfo. "And part of the reason for that is the people who were involved in the incidents I'm talking about are still at the club. They just want to sweep it under the carpet."