Black Caps aim for bland but safe in online world
Neither BJ Watling nor Henry Nicholls were pleased French referees were overseeing the All Blacks test series against the British and Irish Lions in 2017.
That might be the most controversial opinions a current member of the Black Caps test squad has made on Twitter over the past decade, something that’s likely to delight New Zealand Cricket, given the issues confronting their opposition during the current two-match series.
England’s pace-bowling allrounder Ollie Robinson wasn’t playing in the second test against New Zealand at Edgbaston this week after being suspended by the governing body in England and Wales for a series of offensive tweets in his late teens.
Robinson’s actions and subsequent fallout raised another debate on sportspeople and social media use and while former Black Caps skipper Brendon McCullum has already come under the spotlight for a past tweet, it seems the current side have little to fear.
In 2017, Watling retweeted a post from former Black Cap Scott Styris, who wrote ‘‘There will be issues with the French referees in this series’’ when the All Blacks faced the Lions with the comment ‘‘Terrible’’, while Nicholls replied to a tweet describing the referees in the series as ‘‘frustrating, no surprises – who selected them for the big one?’’ by using the hashtag ‘‘#notwrong’’. So don’t expect a string of suspensions ahead of the World Test Championship final, but it’s a given that someone will work through all past and current prognostications, posts and pictures from NZ’s sports stars with the same attention to detail as Line of Duty’s AC-12 interrogation squad.
With the proliferation of athletes posting on social media during the past decade being coupled with that increased scrutiny of their activity, New Zealand Cricket have worked to ensure their contracted players are well versed in how to conduct themselves online.
Eleven of the 17 New Zealand players featured in the two-test series at Lord’s and Edgbaston have Twitter accounts – some rarely used and most seldom stray from bland references to cricket.
NZ Cricket has workshops with all the newly contracted domestic players, in connection with the NZ Cricket Players Association induction programme. There is also a social media/mainstream media induction model for all players newly selected for the Black Caps and White Ferns.
Hence why it’s now massively likely Nicholls, who made his national team test debut in Feburary 2016, won’t again retweet a couple of posts that
featured the hashtag #ThatsPrettyGayAy, or a blast at Sky TV’s customer service from a fellow player, which would draw the ire of his employers due to the criticism of a broadcast partner.
NZ Cricket manager of public affairs Richard Boock said the organisation makes the players aware as soon as they become professional that they will face scrutiny ‘‘and that it does matter what they say, that it can be used as a hook for a story if they do say something controversial’’.
The players also need to be aware of the values of the organisation and messages that may be contradictory, something that goes against the grain of current values or is vulnerable to being misinterpreted.
Boock said there’d been no deep dives taken into historic tweets before or since the Robinson affair exploded in England.
Stand-in second test skipper Tom Latham drily noted during media duties this week that
‘‘Twitter isn’t that massive in New Zealand’’, while Trent Boult admitted the players were aware of their responsibilities.
‘‘In terms of our profession as sportspeople, you’re in the limelight non-stop so, yes, you have to be careful about what you’re putting out there.
‘‘We’re obviously role models to a lot of kids and a lot of fans around the world and have a lot of accountability. It’s a tricky one but you definitely do have to be careful,’’ Boult said.
Many of the country’s leading athletes flock more to Instagram, where they prefer the more ‘relaxed’ atmosphere, whereas Twitter can be a more rapidresponse, volatile environment.
Ross Taylor is NZC’s mostfollowed player on Twitter (with almost 829,000 followers) but its most prolific social media user is Jimmy Neesham, whose output would give the most determined forensic investigator a debilitating eye-strain.
Yet not even an experienced social media user like Neesham, who has allowed his gregarious personality to help shape his online presence, always gets the tone right. He recently made an Instagram post that saw he and fellow Kiwis Trent Boult and Scott Kuggeleijn drinking Corona beers in a pool with Adam Milne giving the finger in the background as a Covid-19 crisis swept India during the Premier League competition.
But a player ‘not reading the room’ and drawing consternation still left the Black Caps relatively untarnished in comparison to their current opposition.