Adil Rashid denies feeling pressure to confirm Michael Vaughan's 'you lot' comment

Adil Rashid has denied being pressurised into supporting Azeem Rafiq's claims that their former team-mate, the ex-England captain Michael Vaughan, made racist remarks to a group of Asian players ahead of a Yorkshire T20 match in 2009.Rashid, who is currently on tour with England's white-ball squad in Bangladesh, joined the Cricket Discipline Commission hearing in London via Zoom on Thursday, where he was cross-examined for 80 minutes by Vaughan's legal team, led by Christopher Stoner KC.Vaughan, who had himself been due to give evidence but is now expected to appear on Friday, is the only one of seven former Yorkshire players - including two fellow Ashes-winners in Matthew Hoggard and Tim Bresnan - willing to answer charges that he, and the club as a whole, breached ECB Directive 3.3 in bringing the game into disrepute.Vaughan categorically denies Rafiq's claim - first made in an interview with Wisden.com in 2020 and subsequently repeated at the DCMS parliamentary hearings in November 2021 - that he had told the four Asian players in Yorkshire's team (Rafiq, Rashid, Ajmal Shahzad and Pakistan's Rana Naved-ul-Hasan) that "there are too many of you lot, we need to have a word about that."In the course of his cross-examination, Rashid told Mr Stoner that he remembered Vaughan making the comment as the team took the field for a Twenty20 Cup fixture against Nottinghamshire at Trent Bridge on June 22, 2009, but insisted that he had not considered it to be racist at the time, rather a "poor attempt at humour".The exact wording of the remark came under scrutiny from Vaughan's team, with Rafiq himself admitting under his own cross-examination later in the day that he had made a "clear mistake" in his witness statement, where he had initially remembered the words as "there's too many of you lot, we need to do something about it".Rashid was also asked about two other witness statements submitted to the hearing, from his former team-mate Shahzad - who was on the field at the time of the alleged remark but has not corroborate