ECB rocked by further tweet row
THREE more England players have been dragged into cricket’s social media firestorm after unsavoury old tweets went viral.
James Anderson, set to win a record 162nd England Test cap against New Zealand tomorrow, joked on Twitter in a now-deleted post from 2010 that teammate Stuart Broad’s new haircut “looked like a 15-year-old lesbian!”
And posts from World Cup-winning captain Eoin Morgan and batsman Jos Buttler, which surfaced in India, appeared to mock subcontinental elocution of English.
Buttler congratulated Alex Hales on a double hundred in August 2017 saying, “much beauty batting you are on fire, sir”. Nine months later, Morgan commended his white-ball vice-captain Buttler, posting: “Sir you’re my favourite batsman.” Both posts have since been removed.
It follows paceman Ollie Robinson’s suspension from international cricket after racist and sexist posts from 2012 and 2013 came to light last week.
Anderson’s recordbreaking appearance at Edgbaston is not under threat over his 11-year-old barb aimed at Broad, saying: “It’s 10 or 11 years ago, I’ve certainly changed as a person. And I think that’s the difficulty – things do change, you do make mistakes.
“If there are any tweets from years ago, we do have to look at that, learn from it and be better in the future, try and make sure we know it’s unacceptable to use these sorts of phrases and language.”
Last night, an ECB spokesperson said: “Since we were alerted to offensive tweets last week, a number of historical social media posts by other individuals have been questioned publicly as well. Given the concerns which have been raised are now clearly broader than a single case, the ECB Board will discuss how we deal with issues over historical social media material.”