As English cricket tackles racism, can soccer show the way?

Weekend after summer weekend, men in pristine white trousers are greeted by polite ripples of applause as they stride onto village greens the length and breadth of England, poised not so much to play a game as to reenact a centuries-old cultural rite.

Nurtured on county lawns – then exported during Britain’s imperial age to the Caribbean, Australia, and the Indian subcontinent – English cricket has long cultivated a genteel image, rooted above all in the idea of fair play.

But that image is suddenly taking a battering following a string of accusations of racism aimed at players of South Asian heritage – made even worse by revelations of how