It's hard to know whether to be annoyed or relieved at English cricket authorities' threats to stop players from Tweeting. The motivation is clearly repressive, a reaction to Yorkshire batsman Azeem Rafiq calling the England Under-19s coach John Abrahams a ‘useless wanker' after being dropped from the side. Maybe Abrahams is indeed useless. Maybe he's not useless, but is a wanker. Shouldn't these things be openly discussed? Not for the ECB, and not, from here on, for Rafiq, who we might next see as a newly-qualified emigrant player for South Africa.

Australia, you recall, had its own Twitter scandal in the 2009 Ashes series when Phil Hughes Tweeted about his omission before it became official. He's probably lucky he didn't call Andrew Hilditch a useless wanker - or else he'd have been really dropped.

It seems rough, a steamroller crushing an ant, to restrict free speech in this way. The further precaution, that the England players are being warned in case they give away team secrets, indicates a paranoia that gives us some hope that the English may yet screw up their best chance to win an Ashes series here in 24 years.

In my opinion, Twittering from players should be banned for the most obvious reason. They Tweet a whole lot of shit.

I've just checked Michael Clarke's Tweets from the team camp at Coolum. Would you believe it, they're having a lot of meetings. Would you believe it, Hughes is falling asleep. Would you believe it, Clarke wants to congratulate his coach Tim Nielsen for something or other. Would you believe it, Clarke has been trading jokes with Warney, who doesn't like meetings either. Would you believe it, Clarke checks footy results with Wendell Sailor. Gosh, I'm not surprised this dialogue has 41,085 followers. I am surprised that there are 46 actually following it.

Meanwhile, Warney is talking to Elizabeth Hurley and Damien Martyn. Breathlessly, we catch up with Warney's exchange with Kevin Pietersen. They are Tweeting about whether Tweeting will be banned. Meanwhile, Pietersen and Mark Boucher are congratulating John Smits on his 100th Test for the Springboks.

I can't believe I've just spent half an hour following this pond scum. By all means, sportsmen are free to talk to each other, but can't they save it for phoning and texting? Why does the world have to know?

Ricky Ponting defended Twitter, and his Facebook page, on the ground that ‘it's part of our job to promote the game'. CaptainPonting, last I looked on Twitter, had been suspended. Maybe he'd accidentally said something interesting.

Ultimately, we find ourselves in the insane world of Catch-22. If any player Tweets anything with any hint of actual content or interest, he would be cut down mid-Tweet. If Ponting said anything half as amusing as the Fake Ponting Twitterer - ‘I hope Richie Benaud hanging up his beige suit doesn't mean we have to listen to more Ian fucking Chappell' - then we might have something worth paying attention to.

Our sole comfort is that as long as the players' Facebook and Twitter presences are kept up to date, we can sleep comfortably in the knowledge that they are not worth following. And as soon as we learn they might have been worth following, they won't be there anymore.