Azeem Rafiq (Urdu: عظیم رفیق; born 27 February 1991) is an English cricketer who played professionally in England for Yorkshire County Cricket Club. A right-arm off-spin bowler, Rafiq played for the county between 2008 and 2014 and 2016 and 2018, making his senior debut at the age of 17. He captained the England under-15 and under-19 teams, and in 2012 became the youngest man to captain a Yorkshire team as well as the first person of Asian origin to do so.
In September 2020, Rafiq made accusations of racism and bullying in Yorkshire. An independent report found that a number of his accusations were true and the case became a major media story in the United Kingdom. It led to several resignations at the club and was the subject of investigations by the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) and the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee in the British parliament.
Rafiq was born in Karachi, Pakistan, in 1991, one of five children, and moved to the United Kingdom in 2001. He grew up in Barnsley in South Yorkshire and attended Holgate School in the town; as a child he played cricket for Barnsley Cricket Club and Yorkshire schools teams. He was a member of Yorkshire's cricket academy and captained the England under-15 team in 2006.
The same year, Rafiq was the recipient of a Sport England award and came to the attention of England bowling coach David Parsons, who earmarked him as a possible future England bowler. He was Yorkshire's Junior Performer of the Year in 2007 and the club's academy player of the year in 2008 as well as being awarded a Brian Johnston Memorial Trust scholarship. He made his Second XI debut for the county during the same year.
Rafiq made his senior debut for Yorkshire's First XI in a Twenty20 Cup match against Nottinghamshire in June 2008. He bowled two overs in the match which Yorkshire won. At the time however, Rafiq did not hold a UK passport and so did not qualify as a domestic player. Yorkshire, who were only allowed to register one overseas player for the competition, had not deregistered their other overseas player and, as a result, were expelled from the competition. In August Rafiq was given special dispensation by the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) to play for Yorkshire for the remainder of the season while his application for British citizenship was being processed; Rafiq's family had begun the process of applying for citizenship some time before, but the process had been "prolonged" by the Home Office.
His citizenship was confirmed later in the year and in October he signed a three-year senior contract with Yorkshire. He captained the county's academy team in a series of matches in Abu Dhabi during the winter and toured South Africa with the England under-19 team in early 2009.
Rafiq made his first-class and List-A debuts for Yorkshire during the 2009 season; aged 18, he scored a century for the team in his second first-class match. He played for England under-19s against Bangladesh during the summer, taking six wickets in an inning at Scarborough and another five-wicket haul at Derby in the two under-19 Test matches before captaining the team during the under-19 One Day International matches which followed.
He was captain of the team during the under-19 tour of Bangladesh later in the year, but gave up the role halfway through the ODI series, before being re-appointed to captain England at the Under-19 World Cup held in New Zealand in early 2010. Following the tournament, the team's then-coach Mark Robinson called Rafiq a "fierce competitor" and an "outstanding captain" who had "led the team really, really well".
Later in 2010, however, Rafiq was dropped from the team for breaking mid-match curfews during a series of matches against Sri Lanka under-19s; he responded by publishing an attack against the team's new coach John Abrahams on his Twitter account, deleting the tweets once he realised they were publicly viewable. Yorkshire suspended him and the ECB later gave him a one-month ban from all cricket as a result of the tweets.
After spending the winter playing grade cricket in Australia, Rafiq spent a month at the start of the 2011 season on loan at Derbyshire County Cricket Club to play regular first-team cricket. He played three County Championship and five Clydesdale Bank 40 matches for the county, taking 11 wickets in what was considered to have been a successful spell at the club, before returning to Yorkshire to play in their Twenty20 Cup campaign later in the season. Speaking after the loan, Rafiq said that he had gained confidence from his time at Derbyshire and "felt loved and wanted out there". At the end of the season he signed a two-year contract extension with Yorkshire after the club was relegated from Division One of the County Championship.
Following the dropping of fellow spin bowler Adil Rashid, Rafiq came back into Yorkshire's County Championship team in 2012, the first time he had played in the county's Championship team since 2010. In June, he captained Yorkshire in six matches in the 2012 Twenty20 Cup when Andrew Gale was injured, becoming the youngest captain in the county's history and the first player of Asian origin to captain the Yorkshire team. The team won five of the six matches he was captain for and Yorkshire reached the final of the competition, losing to Hampshire with Gale back in the team as captain; Rafiq took one wicket in the final.
Towards the end of the 2012 season, Rafiq was instrumental in Yorkshire's promotion back to Division One of the County Championship. He played in ten of the county's 16 Championship matches during the season and took 26 wickets. He took three wickets and scored important runs in a victory over Gloucestershire in a rain-affected match at Scarborough at the end of August, and against Essex in September scored two half-centuries and took eight wickets in the match, including a five-wicket haul, to help guarantee Yorkshire's promotion. Journalist George Dobell was impressed with Rafiq's "grit and determination" while batting in the first innings and with his bowling skill throughout the match. Rafiq's five-wicket haul was the first of his senior career and his match figures of 8/115 were his best in first-class cricket. Dobell wrote that he considered that Rafiq had a chance of playing for England at some point and that "he has a golden future".
The following season, Rafiq captained the team again in Twenty20 matches in Gale's absence and took a five-wicket haul in a one-day match against the touring Bangladesh A team. He spent time with England development squads, but a knee injury caused him problems, and he played rarely for Yorkshire other than in Twenty20 matches. Despite his role in the Twenty20 team, the lack of regular cricket throughout the season led to him choosing to leave the county at the end of the 2014 season, aged 23 and with his bowling action breaking down. Speaking in 2017, he said that he had "lost a lot of confidence in my body and confidence in myself as a person" and did not play professional cricket for almost two years.
Return to Yorkshire and second release
Rafiq came close to signing for Derbyshire at the start of the 2015 season, but the issues with his bowling action continued to cause problems. After playing club cricket for Barnsley and coaching in Dubai during the English winter, Rafiq bowled at the new Yorkshire coach (his old captain, Andrew Gale) in a net session in 2016. He impressed Gale and was asked to play a Second XI match; he was back in the county's First XI the following week, being named player of the match in the team's first win in the 2016 T20 Blast. He took 24 wickets during the season, 15 of them in the t20Blast, and was awarded his county cap.
He continued to play for the county in 2017, taking a five-wicket haul in a Twenty20 match for the first time in August, playing in all competitions and was the county's leading wicket-taker in the One-Day Cup. The following year, however, he played only in Twenty20 matches and was released by Yorkshire at the end of the season, with the club citing a limited budget. He spent some time playing in Pakistan in 2018, including making a single first-class appearance for Sui Southern Gas Company in the Quaid-e-Azam Trophy, before playing minor counties cricket for Lincolnshire County Cricket Club in 2019.