Stuart Broad has indicated that England players would be willing to follow football’s social media blackout to “make a stand” against online abuse after racially motivated attacks on his team-mates Jofra Archer and Moeen Ali.
Archer, 26, had to report two incidents of racist abuse on Instagram last summer, while last week Taslima Nasreen, an author and political activist, tweeted: “If Moeen Ali were not stuck with cricket, he would have gone to Syria to join ISIS.” She subsequently deleted the tweet claiming that she was “being sarcastic”.
“It beggars my belief that someone could write some of the messages to my team-mates that they have to Jofra,” Broad, 34, said. “If you said some of the stuff people say on social media on the street, it wouldn’t end well would it? There are great positives to social media but if we have to lose those positives for a period of time to make a stand then I’d be well up for that.
“If there was action it would come from the leaders in our dressing room and if the team felt like change needed to happen we’ve got some really great people above us in the hierarchy, like [director of cricket] Ashley Giles and [chief executive] Tom Harrison, that would be very open to what the team’s beliefs were. I think it is definitely worth a conversation. It’s a really strong message.
“You don’t want a small minority to ruin the opportunities you get through social media but you do need something drastic to stop it [the abuse] or should there be more responsibility with app creators and more liability?”
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Broad will be part of a star-studded commentary line-up at Sky Sports for the inaugural edition of The Hundred, the new eight-team city based competition which begins in July.
The veteran bowler is not playing in the new competition and will work as a pundit alongside Kevin Pietersen, Wasim Akram, Kumar Sangakkara, Daren Sammy and Tammy Beaumont as well as Sky’s existing pundits Mike Atherton, Rob Key, Mark Butcher, Nasser Hussain and Ebony Rainford-Brent.
Sky have also enlisted Andrew Flintoff as a presenter for their programmes, who will work with co-presenters Kass Naidoo, Zainab Abbas and Jacqueline Shepherd. Sky’s dedicated cricket channel will be re-branded as ‘Sky Sports: The Hundred’ for the duration of the five-week tournament and will show every men’s and women’s game — 68 matches in total. The BBC has the rights to show ten men’s and eight women’s matches in the tournament, including the finals, and their coverage will be led by former England bowler Isa Guha.
The tournament gets under way on July 21 with a standalone women’s match between Manchester Originals and Oval Invincibles, followed by the corresponding men’s match the day after. All matches after that will be double headers, with the men’s and women’s matches being played on the same day at the same venue and what is being branded “high quality” live entertainment including live music in between the two matches. The Hundred will offer equal prize money for the men’s and womens’ tournament.
Each of the eight teams will play four home and four away games in the group stages, which will include playing their closest team geographically twice. The top team will progress straight through to the final and the second and third placed teams will meet in a play-off at the Kia Oval the day before the finals, which will be played at Lord’s on August 21.
