HE CAN'T BELIEVE IT...........................

Joey Bartons twitter posts have been crazy. However, he does have a valid point. Some of the women pundits arent on telly because of their talent or on merit. They are on telly because it ticks a box on the equality and diversity side.

Chinaman wrote:Surely people should be chosen on their ability and competence to do the job? Any job actually. It' should not be about box ticking or indeed "diversity" with all its questionable meanings. Who cares (apart from the wokeists) what their gender or colour is. When you start employing people for pc reasons you can't always expect the best. With regard to cricket it doesn't seem to matter who it is, they all seem pretty poor these days.

Chinaman

In an ideal world that is what should happen. But does it?

Years ago, someone at Fprds (I think) asked the question "why do we have far fewer black workers than the local population make-up would suggest we should?". The answer was that most of their recruitment was done on a word-of-mouth basis, thus you predominantly got family members and friends of people already working there. So you had a discriminatory outcome, even though nobody at Fords had the least intention of discriminating.

A bit of idle googling then threw up this, from a long time ago (but probably not quite as old)
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/ford-workers-claim-racist-bias-on-jobs-1349499.html

where the suggestion is that driving jobs were handed down from father to son, with predictable results. This despite the overall Fords workforce being much more diverse than it had been when the earlier question was asked,.

Of course this is not restricted to race, nor is it one sided. It's also unrealistic to think that small businesses will not recruit on a word-of-mouth basis. But large employers ought not be doing that, not just for equality reasons but because they miss out on good people (who might also challenge groupthink). If there is underrepresentation someone ought to do what Fords did, work out why and then sort it. Just assuming that your practices must be OK is not enough. Or that because we have sorted one part of the problem we have solved the whole thing.

This isn't just about race of course and it can cut both ways (though having difficulty getting a job with 90% of businesses would be more disheartening than having difficulty getting a job with 10% of them). Some recruit (or at least used to) via the old boys' or Oxbridge network. Do masons still help each other in some organisations? What about the carousel of non-exec directors appointing each other to their boards? And the other carousel of failed football managers...

Strange but I have never seen a white diversity officer (these people are also very disproportionately paid high wages).One wonders if there’s a deliberate lack of diversity due to its demographics. It therefore is perfectly acceptable to have prejudice against white candidates. White people are not appointed, not due to their potential lack of ability but simply and solely the colour of their skin.
Oh the raging hypocrisy.

Suggest this particular conversation continues on the Anything But Cricket Thread before someone moans.

Can't vouch for the statistic, which I presume is for the UK, but according to this 81% of top diversity posts are filled by whites. The poster thinks this is a problem but is rightly called out in the comments.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/bonnie-dilber_81-of-chief-diversity-officers-are-white-activity-7018261840283541505-FtLs

I do like the thought of SWC applying to be a diversity officer though...

Chinaman wrote:Suggest this particular conversation continues on the Anything But Cricket Thread before someone moans.

Because it doesn't relate to cricket at all?

It is strange, though, how the "it's not related to cricket" thing does not appear immediately something anti-woke is posted, rather than after a rejoinder has appeared!

VicNorth wrote:

Chinaman wrote:Suggest this particular conversation continues on the Anything But Cricket Thread before someone moans.

Because it doesn't relate to cricket at all?

Well that's how it started, but it's developing into a far more general conversational topic around diversity, gender, woke etc.. I don't mind but others often do.

adelaide wrote:I note that nobody seems to complain about Jonathan Pearce

I did exactly that on the Friends of Fulham forum, thank you very much. He is awful.

The problem is that women are apparently shielded from criticism, Karen Carney is rubbish but Leeds were criticised for calling out her nonsense. Fulham criticised Jermaine Jenas a few years ago but didn't get the backlash.

----

As I have said before I could listen to Atherton and Hussain all day but there are very few commentators in that mould these days.

adelaide wrote:

Chinaman wrote:Surely people should be chosen on their ability and competence to do the job? Any job actually. It' should not be about box ticking or indeed "diversity" with all its questionable meanings. Who cares (apart from the wokeists) what their gender or colour is. When you start employing people for pc reasons you can't always expect the best. With regard to cricket it doesn't seem to matter who it is, they all seem pretty poor these days.

Chinaman

In an ideal world that is what should happen. But does it?

Years ago, someone at Fprds (I think) asked the question "why do we have far fewer black workers than the local population make-up would suggest we should?". The answer was that most of their recruitment was done on a word-of-mouth basis, thus you predominantly got family members and friends of people already working there. So you had a discriminatory outcome, even though nobody at Fords had the least intention of discriminating.

A bit of idle googling then threw up this, from a long time ago (but probably not quite as old)
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/ford-workers-claim-racist-bias-on-jobs-1349499.html

where the suggestion is that driving jobs were handed down from father to son, with predictable results. This despite the overall Fords workforce being much more diverse than it had been when the earlier question was asked,.

Of course this is not restricted to race, nor is it one sided. It's also unrealistic to think that small businesses will not recruit on a word-of-mouth basis. But large employers ought not be doing that, not just for equality reasons but because they miss out on good people (who might also challenge groupthink). If there is underrepresentation someone ought to do what Fords did, work out why and then sort it. Just assuming that your practices must be OK is not enough. Or that because we have sorted one part of the problem we have solved the whole thing.

This isn't just about race of course and it can cut both ways (though having difficulty getting a job with 90% of businesses would be more disheartening than having difficulty getting a job with 10% of them). Some recruit (or at least used to) via the old boys' or Oxbridge network. Do masons still help each other in some organisations?  What about the carousel of non-exec directors appointing each other to their boards? And the other carousel of failed football managers...

No it doesn't always happen because it's not an ideal world, for example there have always been "jobs for the boys". But even from a cricket perspective look what happened to the South African Test side some years back: because of a quota system they often did not pick players on cricketing ability and the team almost hit rock bottom as a consequence. Mind you looks like Yorkshire are going anti-woke by getting Graves back. Or maybe they just got the Rafiq thing wrong...

RB wrote:

As I have said before I could listen to Atherton and Hussain all day but there are very few commentators in that mould these days.

Nasser 'Reverse' Hussain is terrible.

Chinaman wrote:But even from a cricket perspective look what happened to the South African Test side some years back: because of a quota system they often did not pick players on cricketing ability and the team almost hit rock bottom as a consequence. Mind you looks like Yorkshire are going anti-woke by getting Graves back. Or maybe they just got the Rafiq thing wrong...

Yorkshire can't find any other source of funding. They certainly got the Rafiq thing wrong ... years ago when they failed to investigate it, let alone challenge it. I have a feeling that's not what you meant though...

IIRC South Africa operated a quota system for years - 100 per cent white. Hashim Amla, Maharaj, Rabada. Ngidi (and of course D'Oliveira) would not have been allowed to play. I suppose it is a moot point whether Amla or Maharaj would have become the players they eventually became without getting a leg up from the quota. I suspect that the reason for the quota was to reduce the risk that old attitudes would live on amongst selectors and administrators, consciously or otherwise, with black players still not being selected and junior black players therefore turning their backs on the game. Abolishing apartheid would not have changed attitudes overnight and there were some pretty heavily entrenched attitudes out there. That's the whole point of all this stuff - making people equal in law does not by itself bring equality of opportunity.

Was the quota something like three players? I don't think that would have been enough to send them to rock bottom. I suspect that our Kolpak system was a bigger factor, as in order to make a decent living players had to give up playing for their national team. The quota is still there, I think, and South Africa aren't at all shabby when they ae not denuded by franchise competitions.

Nasser makes me ill.

I'm sure Pearce was banned years ago for having a fit every time someone crossed the halfway line.Sadly,they let him back.

Nasser is not a commentator.He is a predictor.Is he going to go yorkers,what will he bowl next,will he try and hide it,will he go back of a length etc etc etc ad infinitum.

Has he got mental scarring/baggage.It's a game of Cricket,mostly played on sunny days FFS not a battlefield.

Why doesn't he shut his gob and wait and see what happens?

"Bowling into the pitch."
Where else are you going to bowl it?

adelaide wrote:

Chinaman wrote:But even from a cricket perspective look what happened to the South African Test side some years back: because of a quota system they often did not pick players on cricketing ability and the team almost hit rock bottom as a consequence. Mind you looks like Yorkshire are going anti-woke by getting Graves back. Or maybe they just got the Rafiq thing wrong...

Yorkshire can't find any other source of funding. They certainly got the Rafiq thing wrong ... years ago when they failed to investigate it, let alone challenge it. I have a feeling that's not what you meant though...

IIRC South Africa operated a quota system for years - 100 per cent white. Hashim Amla, Maharaj, Rabada. Ngidi (and of course D'Oliveira) would not have been allowed to play. I suppose it is a moot point whether Amla or Maharaj would have become the players they eventually became without getting a leg up from the quota. I suspect that the reason for the quota was to reduce the risk that old attitudes would live on amongst selectors and administrators, consciously or otherwise, with black players still not being selected and junior black players therefore turning their backs on the game. Abolishing apartheid would not have changed attitudes overnight and there were some pretty heavily entrenched attitudes out there. That's the whole point of all this stuff - making people equal in law does not by itself bring equality of opportunity.

Was the quota something like three players? I don't think that would have been enough to send them to rock bottom. I suspect that our Kolpak system was a bigger factor, as in order to make a decent living players had to give up playing for their national team. The quota is still there, I think, and South Africa aren't at all shabby when they ae not denuded by franchise competitions.

But the South African quota has now swung almost completely the other way: in that you have to have a % of ethnic players in the side regardless of ability. That's wrong and it illustrates the problem with diversity and equality. Look at Yorkshire as well, yes there were problems depending on your point of view but how many of those "guilty of racism" we're in fact later compensated for wrongful dismissal? Rafiq was far from being Mr Perfect in this, and is actually not a very pleasant fellow. It strikes me that diversity and equality are either one thing or the other, with no middle ground or common sense. My experience with diversity officers is that they tend to look for problems which are often not their, just to justify their inflated salaries and position. Stop putting people into categories.

We'll never know for sure but if there had been no quotas initially post-apartheid it is a fair bet that the selectors would have continued selecting an all-white team, maybe on strict merit, maybe not, for a few years. That in turn would probably have put off the next generation of non-white players, who would now be shoe-ins on merit, from serious involvement in the game. The same would go for rugby, perhaps even more so. Are the quotas still needed when both sports have had black captains? Maybe not but I think the argument at the time was quite strong. Just changing laws is not always enough.

Rafiq may well have all kinds of character flaws. By all means call him out for that but it cannot justify racist so-called banter on top of that. If YCCC had understood that ten years ago they would have avoided everything that has befallen them since.

My understanding of the letter which led to the mass sackings was that it got close to arguing that his dodgy character was a kind of justification for racism. The wrongful dismissal findings were about process by the way; whether the sackings would have been justified if done through a proper process was never tested.

I'd love to be in a world where people aren't put into categories. Which is of course part of what racists of all colours do, and would carry on doing without pressure for change. When I first started work the senior managers were exclusively old white men and most of them were racist and sexist (the women working them were doing so for pin money, apparently) and went to the pub Friday lunchtimes to imbibe and watch the strippers. Most of that would no longer be true but I'm not sure how much would have changed without the proactive diversity and equality agenda which you decry.

Blimey,the size of the Pakistan wicketkeeper today.He makes Inzi look like Twiggy.

Presumably on the same basis as goalkeeper William Foulkes, who we would no longer be able to call "Fatty". If the keeper is big enough he can block the entire goal/prevent any byes.

Even some decades ago football programmes had taken to describing the, er, stockier goalkeepers as "well built for the position". I can remember it being applied to John Burridge.

There are suggestions that the chant "who ate all the pies?" was first aimed at Foulkes. Apparently he played a few county cricket matches for Derbyshire. I doubt he was in the outfield.

Kerry O'Keefe seems to be the standard most Aussie comentators judge themselves, there's an excrutiating clip where Michael Vaughan is trying to trade drinking stories with a room full of them, and his most rebellious time on tour seems to be someone passing the bottle of Port the wrong way.

Peter.M.Gardens wrote:Kerry O'Keefe seems to be the standard most Aussie comentators judge themselves, there's an excrutiating clip where Michael Vaughan is trying to trade drinking stories with a room full of them, and his most rebellious time on tour seems to be someone passing the bottle of Port the wrong way.

The right way is towards me!

I gave up on this farce a while back..................


Friday, January 19: Qualifier - Brisbane Heat v Sydney Sixers (Heritage Bank Stadium, 6.40pm)

Saturday, January 20: Knockout - Perth Scorchers v Adelaide Strikers (Optus Stadium, 7:15pm)

Monday, January 22: Challenger - Brisbane Heat v Adelaide Strikers (Heritage Bank Stadium, 6.30pm)

Wednesday, January 24: Final - Sydney Sixers v Brisbane Heat (SCG, 7.15pm)

Qualifier - Brisbane Heat v Sydney Sixers


Final - Sydney Sixers v Brisbane Heat

Bear in mind that it might be two completely different sets of players?

How does a team lose in the knock out stage yet progress to the final? Or am i getting mixed up (again)...............