When Isa Guha made what she called a “genuine slip-up” by referring to India’s spearhead Jasprit Bumrah as their “most valuable primate” on the second morning of the Gabba Test, she inadvertently touched multiple fault lines in cricket and culture.
Guha created headlines for using a word that ran contrary to her track record of pushing for inclusion in cricket.
While fellow commentators in the Fox Cricket box were briefly surprised before carrying on, the reverberations started online and on social media.
The clip was first picked up by the sports website The Roar, which was then distributed widely across the day. Seven, Fox Cricket’s cricket broadcast rights partner and rival, ran the gaffe with high prominence on the nightly news, and overnight numerous outlets in India and the UK picked it up.
Not least of these was the Telegraph in London, which ran the story and then Guha’s subsequent apology as the second most prominent item on their homepage. This masthead also published a story on Monday.
Through all of this, Guha was clearly embarrassed and sorrowful, both for her language and the reaction it caused.
Fox Sports commentator Isa Guha.Credit: Getty Images
This was not just because she had been “caught out”. Guha has been and will continue to be one of the most eloquent advocates for diversity and inclusion in sport and society, both here and in the UK. She runs her own advocacy organisation, Take Her Lead, that aims to increase cricket opportunities for women.
Paramount for Guha and for Fox Cricket was to reach out to Bumrah and the Indian team to apologise and clear the air. Cricket Australia’s chief executive Nick Hockley was also sought out.
Steve Crawley, the executive director of Fox Sports, said he did not compel Guha to make her statement on the air.
“I thought it was a class act,” Crawley told this masthead. “She’s sitting next to one of the most distinguished Indian cricket people of all time in Ravi Shastri, and she did what she does at the Olympics and at Wimbledon and at Test cricket and she held her own.
“I don’t look at it as an apology, I look at it as an explanation. She always means well, and in this area of our lives, no one gets it 100 per cent right 100 per cent of the time. We’re all nervous and on eggshells because good people want to get it right.”
Crawley also questioned why Seven had run the news so prominently on Sunday night.
“For Channel Seven to run a piece on her commentary as the second main story of the evening behind only the Bali Nine last night, was very questionable,” he said. “But I understand we’re competing against each other for the cricket audience and people draw hard lines.
“Of course we support Isa. We’ve picked what we consider to be the best commentary team in world cricket and she’s a part of that too.”
This is complicated territory for Fox Cricket. At the outset of the season the network’s head of cricket, Matt Weiss, resigned after he was linked to social media activity that allegedly involved the prolonged use of fake accounts to disparage and attack others in the media.
At the same time, Guha shares a place on the Fox commentary team with former England captain Michael Vaughan, who is also a Telegraph columnist. The pair were on the opposite sides of the messy Yorkshire racism saga that cost multiple people their jobs at the club and was subject to multiple investigations.
Former Yorkshire player Azeem Rafiq alleged that Vaughan remarked of south Asian cricketers at Yorkshire in 2009: “There’s too many of you lot, we need to do something about that.”
Vaughan was temporarily stood down from the BBC’s cricket coverage as a result of the allegation. After multiple investigations over several years, it was ultimately decided that “on the balance of probabilities” Vaughan did not make the comment.
Guha, who also works for the BBC, was outspoken about the Yorkshire case. She wrote a guest editorial for Wisden Cricket Monthly in which she praised Rafiq for putting a spotlight on racism, and called on cricket’s leaders “to tackle the culture of discrimination which threatens cricket’s integrity”.
She also detailed her own experience, “sometimes feeling the burden of responsibility” and sometimes not having the strength to call out discriminatory comments.
Primate, of course, can refer to a person in charge. Among other things, it is the label applied to the head of the Anglican Church. In the context of an India-Australia series in which Bumrah has been close to unplayable, it might have been intended to refer to the alpha-male of the bowling attack. Misspoken or not, Guha clearly intended to speak in praise.
As Crawley put it on 3AW this morning: “I know her not only as one of the world’s great sports commentators but probably the least racist person I’ve ever encountered in anything I’ve done.
“I can understand from a media point of view why it’s a story on one hand and then when I have a look at the details in the facts, it’s probably still a story, but with the explanation that she’s done nothing wrong.”
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