Judge Ollie Robinson on his cricket skills, not his tweets

Ollie Robinson, who made his Test debut for England at Lord’s last week against New Zealand, is an outstanding cricketer with both bat and ball. But that ability apparently counts for little. His performance was overshadowed by the discovery of some incendiary, tasteless tweets he had sent almost a decade ago as a teenage professional. An abject apology was not enough to save him. The England Cricket Board promptly banned Robinson from the next Test match, and a full inquiry has been launched into his conduct.

Quite rightly, sports minister Oliver Dowden has called the penalty ‘over the top’. But that intervention has not helped Robinson. This row marks a depressing moment for English cricket. It also raises a key question: is any player safe? 

Certainly not some of the players of yesterday. Indeed, the rich irony is that if English cricket is really going to have ideological purity tests, then some of the game’s greatest names would have failed to pass them. 

Joe Root, the Test captain, may be fluent in the fashionable jargon of equity and inclusion, but several of his predecessors were very different.