Ottis Gibson: 'Harsh' to hit Yorkshire with points deductions for past failings

Ottis Gibson, Yorkshire's head coach, has questioned the logic of punishing the club's new regime for past failings, after the ECB recommended a £500,000 fine and points deductions at Tuesday's hearing of the Cricket Discipline Commission (CDC).

Gibson, the first Black head coach in Yorkshire's history, was appointed in January 2022 following the sacking of 16 members of the club's back-room staff, including his predecessor Andrew Gale and the director of cricket, Martyn Moxon.

That decision was taken by the since-departed chairman, Lord Kamlesh Patel, whose own appointment had come in the wake of Azeem Rafiq's explosive testimony before a parliamentary select committee in November 2021, at which he had laid out his experience of institutional racism at the club.

The fall-out from the scandal left Yorkshire facing bankruptcy, with the ECB suspending their major-match hosting status (a move since reversed), while a swathe of leading sponsors also severed ties with the club - including Emerald, Headingley's title sponsors, and Nike, the kit suppliers.

And while Gibson acknowledged that some form of punishment was inevitable, he described the proposed sanctions as "harsh" - not least because the club, currently in the bottom three of the County Championship but in contention for a knock-out berth in the T20 Blast - has already played a significant portion of the season while knowing that their fate had yet to be decided.

Given that promotion back to the top flight of the County Championship already seems unlikely, the ECB's proposed hit of 48-72 points might not affect the club's status much beyond prize money. However, the proposed 4-6 point deduction for the T20 Blast would almost certainly prove the difference in the race for the quarter-finals. Yorkshire are currently fifth on 13 points, just one point behind their arch-rivals Lancashire in second place, whom they play on Friday.

"If you remember when I came here in March last year and this whole investigation was going on, I said, 'It would be nice of them to let us know before the start of the season what sanctions there were going to be'," Gibson told the ECB Reporters Network.

"We're sat here the following June and we're still not sure what it is or isn't. It's frustrating because a lot of change has taken place here at Yorkshire, including myself being here.

"I feel like when this thing all started many years ago, long before I got here, the club was stripped of international cricket because of what had gone on.

"Then the ECB said, 'If you want international cricket back, you have to satisfy us that you're doing these things'. They gave the club a list of things, and Lord Patel came in and made some tough and uncomfortable decisions I would imagine.

"We got our international cricket back, which would seem to me to suggest that we'd satisfied the ECB and done the things they asked us to do in the first place.

"So to sanction a group of people who are trying to move the club forward doesn't seem to me to make sense. It would be naive to think that we're not going to get some sort of punishment, but it does seem a bit harsh.

"That's my position as the coach of a fairly new group of players."