Punjab cricketer stands up for Rihanna...

Big-ticket cricket celebrities like Sachin Tendulkar and Head Coach Ravi Shastri had, on Wednesday, said in reply to tweets from pop star Rihanna and teen climate activist Greta Thunberg that the farmer protests are an internal matter and that external forces cannot become participants.

On Thursday, three cricketers held a mirror for superstars like Sachin, Virat Kohli and Roit Sharma, all of who echoed the government's point of view that Rihanna and Thunberg were encroaching on the Indian mindspace.

Sandeep Sharma, who plays cricket for Punjab, voiced his support for Rihanna, with a long note on Twitter on Thursday morning before deleting it.

'By this logic no one should care about each other because every situation is someone's internal affair,' Patiala-born Sandeep tweeted.

Another cricketer who made a sharp assessment of the Rihanna-Greta drama was former Bengal captain Manoj Tiwary.

'When I was a kid, I never saw a puppet show. It took me 35 years to see one,' Tiwary tweeted about the flood of coordinated celebrity tweets on Wednesday.

'When George Floyd was brutally murdered in the USA by a policeman, our country rightly expressed our grief. #justsaying,' Irfan Pathan tweeted.

Pathan and Tiwary have retired from the game and thus unlikely to be penalised for their candour. Not so Sharma, which perhaps accounts for why the gusty bowler deleted his tweet.