The Warwickshire wicketkeeper-batter Alex Davies has been banned from five matches & fined £1500 for a series of offensive tweets he has posted as a teenager.
Alex Davies has been banned for discriminatory language
Davis has joined the Warwickshire club ahead of the 2022 season & was among the five Lancashire players who have been investigated internally for posting social media messages containing “discriminatory language” last season.
The Lancashire Telegraph has reported in June that Davies, Liam Hurt, Luke Wells, Josh Bohannon, and Richard Gleeson were under investigation, following the emergence of Ollie Robinson’s past tweets during his England Test debut. The players were handed formal warnings from the club.
However, A disciplinary panel headed by the ECB’s Cricket Discipline Commission (CDC) found that Davies tweets were “in clear breach of the ECB’s anti-discrimination policy”, adding that “the gravity of this matter lies not just within the nature of the posts themselves, but because the message must be made clear to all who play the professional game, and to all those who play elsewhere, that such behaviour will not be tolerated.”
The CDC report said, “AD [Davies] acted in breach of these ECB directives because of his posting of a series of 17 offensive tweets from his Twitter account over 19 months between September 3, 2011, and April 6, 2013, when he was aged 17 and 18.
“At all material times, he was a registered cricketer with LCCC [Lancashire]. He accepts that he received training in the use of social media throughout this period, although the panel accepts that the sophistication of that training has advanced significantly since.
“These tweets contained several racists, sexist, disablist, homophobic, and other offensive remarks. They were publicly accessible until June 2021, when AD deleted his Twitter account.”
Davies’ voluntary work and character references would be considered as plus points
The report also stated that the gravity of Davies matter is not that series. The factors like eight years – that had elapsed since his tweets were posted, a lack of previous disciplinary offences committed, his voluntary work within the sport, and character references would be considered as plus points for Davies.
“AD’s remorse and shame are, in the panel’s view, both sincere and insightful,” the report added.
“He expressed these sentiments in his early admission of guilt and ongoing cooperation in these proceedings, as well as a further apology made directly to the panel: these factors are very much to his credit.”
Four out of five matches that involved Davies in the Playing XI have been suspended. This means he will probably miss only Warwickshire’s opening County Championship fixture against Surrey in April.
He has two weeks to challenge the punishment. Still, Warwickshire’s chairman, mark McCafferty, said that the club expects him “to accept his punishment with good grace and focus now on being the best cricketer he can be, as well as working with us to ensure that the club is inclusive to all in every respect”.
“We support the decision of the Cricket Disciplinary Committee to issue Alex Davies with a fine and match ban for comments he made on social media several years ago, before joining Warwickshire CCC,” McCafferty added.
“There is no excuse for any form of discrimination, regardless of when it took place, and there has to be a real consequence for such actions. That said, people need to be allowed to learn from their mistakes, and he is extremely apologetic, recognizes that what he wrote as a young man was wrong, and has since worked hard to improve his attitude to life, as well as support younger players as they transition to being professionals”, McCafferty concluded.