This isn’t cricket! Harbhajan and Amir need to realise what they are doing is absolutely bad

Cricket heroes Harbhajan and Amir take to Twitter, unleash a war of words that could make you cringe

Gone are the days when cricket used to be called the gentleman’s game. Cricket players are revered and worshipped as ultimate gentlemen, across nations where the game is played. Sportive behaviour and respect for rival players and countries have always stood as the hallmark of the game. Not anymore!

What leads to such a thought and worry is the slugfest currently playing to full galleries on Twitter. The two players under the social media limelight are Harbhajan Singh and Mohammad Amir.

Proven players both of them indeed are. But then, the show they are putting up in front of hundreds of thousands of cricket fans is nothing but despicable.

Cricket heroes, unruly men

It all started as banter, which later blew up into a slugfest of unimaginable proportions. Amir triggered it all soon after Pakistan defeated India on Sunday, asking Harbhajan how he was coping with the defeat.

India’s own turbanator did not feel like taking the question in its stride and retorted with a video of him striking a huge sixer off Pakistan seamer Shoaib Akhtar’s delivery to win the match for India in the 2010 Asia Cup.

https://twitter.com/harbhajan_singh/status/1453080182332346370

The tweets then continued to flow in gay abandon.  As many as 8 tweets, all loaded with sarcasm, flew to and fro between Harbhajan and Amir’s Twitter handles. Harbhajan even went to the extent of poking Amir about the spot-fixing episode he was involved in and the ban that stopped his cricketing career for years together.

Amir, on the other hand, lost control of his language and started posting derogatory comments as tweets, irking Harbhajan big time. The tweet slugfest is still continuing, and the cricket world must surely be embarrassed.

Two players of top calibre playing foul on Twitter is the last thing we, as cricket fans, would expect to see.

https://twitter.com/iamamirofficial/status/1453081580159787018

https://twitter.com/harbhajan_singh/status/1453062908376616961

Not gentlemanly, by any standards

Wonder why players adored by millions stoop to such low levels in the name of a win or loss. Such behaviour isn’t cricket, as everyone on the field and off it would agree.

But these two players taking personal rivalry to abysmal levels isn’t something Indian or Pakistani cricket fans would want to go through, for sure! Madness is what the world would call it.

There are certain norms that stars of the public domain need to adhere to. Harbhajan and Amir have lost all sense of propriety, by bringing bad behaviour in the open.

Would you as a cricket fan want such slugfests to go on?

https://www.digpu.com/opinion/this-isnt-cricket-harbhajan-amir-twitter-slugfest