The England and Wales Cricket Board has broadened its investigation to probe if other senior cricketers including Eoin Morgan and Jos Buttler posted racist tweets mocking Indian accent in 2018. This was after several netizens reproduced controversial tweets posted by Morgan and Buttler on Twitter. Elsewhere, England’s highest wicket-taker, James Anderson, has apologised for his homophobic tweet, posted in 2010.
One of the controversial tweets by Eoin Morgan, England’s World Cup-winning captain, read, “Sir you’re my favourite batsman.” Buttler, for his part, wrote, “I always reply sir no1 else like me like you like me.”
In another post, now deleted, Buttler said, “Well done on double 100 much beauty batting you are on fire sir.”
Both Morgan and Buttler are regular players of the Indian Premier League.
As for Anderson, his tweet for fellow bowler Stuart Broad had read, “I saw [Stuart] Broady’s new haircut for the first time today.” “Not sure about it. Thought he looked like a 15 yr old lesbian!”
Anderson has now apologised for his controversial tweet. According to London’s The Telegraph, Anderson said, “For me it’s 10-11 years ago, I’ve certainly changed as a person.” He added, “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 and again learn from this and be better in the future, try and make sure we know it’s unacceptable to use these sorts of phrases and language.”
Earlier, the ECB had suspended Ollie Robinson from all form of international cricket pending an inquiry by the disciplinary committee for his racist and sexist tweets posted in 2012 and 2013. There were reports that the ECB had also begun a probe against an unnamed second English player, who’s a part of the England team.
The fresh development comes just a day before England are scheduled to take on New Zealand in a series decider at the Edgbaston cricket stadium in Birmingham.
