est Indies were flying a Black Lives Matter flag from their balcony. It was one of the first things you saw as the cameras panned across the empty ground on the opening morning of the opening match of this strange and delayed cricket season. Later, when they came out on to the ground, you could see their players were wearing one black glove each. Both teams took the knee before the start of play and as they did it West Indies raised their gloved fists in salute, a clear, conscious echo of the protests made by the sprinters John Carlos and Tommie Smith as they stood on the podium at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico. You can’t understand the history of cricket without understanding the history of empire. You can’t appreciate the rivalries between these, and other, teams, without appreciating the relationship between our countries, what’s been given, and what’s been taken. You can’t understand the hostility of Michael Holding’s bowling without understanding what made him so angry, you can’t appreciate Frank Worrell’s grace as a captain without knowing something of the prejudice he faced, you can’t value the violence of Viv Richards’ batting without a sense of what he was fighting against. You can’t separate sport from politics, or have the cricket without the cause. But plenty of people would like to. Sky, to their credit, didn’t let them. Midway through the very first over, their live footage was stuck on a slow-mo of Kemar Roach walking back to his mark, and they were unable to cut away in time to capture his fourth or fifth deliveries. In between his ad-libs describing what we were missing, Holding explained they were having “technical hitches”. Their cameras were down. Imagine the flap. You could almost hear the engineers swearing. They shouldn’t worry because their broadcast won’t be remembered for the little things they got wrong but the big things they got right. During the first of many rain delays, they delivered a brilliant half-hour of sports broadcasting. It opened with a quote from James Baldwin: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced,” and followed up by making good on the promise of those words. They did it by focusing on the experiences of Holding and Ebony Rainford-Brent. The latter spoke about “the constant drip, drip” of racism she had put up with during her career in English cricket, all the loaded remarks about her hair, her body and her food, “day in, day out”, the way a coach always referred to “your lot” in conversations with her. Rainford-Brent, the first black woman to play for England, is known as one of the warmest people on the cricket circuit. She broke down as she explained how her jovial personality had been shaped by her reluctance to push back against those prejudices. The film included footage of Mike Gatting, the former MCC president and current ECB ambassador, being heckled by anti-racism campaigners for taking “blood money” on the rebel tour to apartheid South Africa. And if the point wasn’t clear enough, Rainford-Brent pressed it by pointing out the structural racism in the England and Wales Cricket Board, and at all levels of the game in England. She bluntly pointed out there are no black members of the ECB board, no black directors of cricket, no black chief executives, and no black captains among the 18 counties and that black participation in grassroots cricket is tiny. Holding continued, live on air, with an extraordinary monologue that took in everything from the recent video of Amy Cooper threatening to call the police on a black man in Central Park who asked her to put her dog on a lead, to the historic representation of Christ as a white man, to the erasure of Lewis Howard Latimer (the black man who perfected the lightbulb) at the expense of Thomas Edison. Holding spoke about research at Yale that revealed the extent of unconscious bias among pre-school teachers and he spoke about research by the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that showed how white policemen invariably overestimate the age of black children. It was eloquent, intelligent, and confrontational broadcasting, fiercely uncompromising stuff for an audience who were tuning in because they wanted the comfort and relief of live cricket, of cakes and sunshine and sixes. And it was capped by Nasser Hussain. “People will be tuning in and saying: ‘Not this again,’” Hussain said. “All I’ll say to those people who say ‘not again’ is that a few weeks ago I watched a black man being killed in front of my eyes on Channel 4 news, and my natural reaction was to look away. Next time that footage came on, I forced myself to watch because I felt something inside of myself say: ‘You’ve been looking away too long.’”