This Friday’s Yorkshire Race Crisis took another turn when Andrew Gale (coach) was accused of posting an antisemitic tweet while he was club captain.
Gale sent a tweet to Leeds United’s then head of media Paul Dews in 2010 that included the words ‘button it yid!’, Jewish News reported yesterday.
The Yorkshire coach said he was ‘completely unaware’ of the offensive nature of the term when he sent the tweet, which was deleted soon after it was posted.
Andrew Gale, head coach of Yorkshire, has been accused by a tweet that was anti-Semitic
‘This post is part of a conversational thread between Paul Dews and myself,’ said Gale. ‘The reference is to a chant that was prevalent at the time towards Leeds fans.
‘Within a few minutes of the post Paul called me and explained the meaning of the word and that it was offensive to Jews. It was completely unclear to me what this meant and I immediately deleted it. I would never have used that word had I been aware of its offensive meaning and I haven’t used it since.’
Over the last week, racism accusations against Azeem Rajiq rocked cricket.
Yorkshire chief executive Mark Arthur told Jewish News: ‘This kind of behaviour would be completely unacceptable to the club. Now we are aware of it, it goes without saying we will investigate the allegation thoroughly.’
Coincidentally, they are exactly the same words used by Yorkshire following Sportsmail’s revelation on Friday that an unnamed British Asian member of their academy was another player, along with Azeem Rafiq, to suffer racial abuse.
Clearly investigations for Yorkshire as well as the ECB have intensified.