Players don't need privacy. They need to say more stupid things on stump mics
Our correspondent looks at all the hot topics in cricket, including the Nigerian princes writing emails to Brendan Taylor
Should we be turning off stump mics in between deliveries, so that international cricketers can have a safe space on the field that they will use to more readily abuse each other? Some ex-players think so. News flash, though, dinosaurs, there's no such thing as privacy anymore. Today's cricketers are Instagramming their workouts, Tik-Toking their kids, tweeting their vaccination views, YouTubing their friendships, and perhaps, very soon, selling their colonoscopies as NFTs.
Look, we all made fun of them. How we laughed when Virat Kohli and KL Rahul and R Ashwin leaned into the stumps in Cape Town and expressed their displeasure at a DRS call that overturned an lbw dismissal against Dean Elgar. How we giggled at their frustration.
Brendan Taylor was last month banned from cricket for four breaches of the ICC's anti-corruption code. He tried to get ahead of the story by admitting on his social media that he had failed to disclose a corrupt approach to the ICC for four months, but even if we believe Taylor never intended to get involved in fixing, all these warning signs were ignored:
Bhanuka Rajapaksa, who strikes at 136 and has hit two T20I fifties, he will have you know, was in the headlines in January for retiring from international cricket at age 30, then un-retiring days later after the country's sports minister met with him and asked him to stick around. Why did he retire in the first place? Sri Lanka have recently tightened up their minimum fitness standards, and Rajapaksa, by his own admission, was not on track to meet them. Why did he not work on meeting them when he had known for months that his fitness was a concern? Well, if he drops some weight he thinks he might not be able to hit the ball as hard, and distance = speed x time x flab.
Although he is no longer India's coach, Ravi Shastri has come out strong in support of Virat Kohli since Kohli stepped down as captain. Shastri has defended the team's defeats in South Africa, as well as Kohli's inability to deliver India a world title as captain. There's no joke about Shastri here. We're all out. In the end, love conquers all.
Andrew Fidel Fernando is ESPNcricinfo's Sri Lanka correspondent. @afidelf