Move over WTC, the World Bad Behaviour Championship has a winner
The WTC mace may have gone to the deserving victors, but only one man was really competing for the other crown

They're so nice, watch out their smiles don't blind you • ICC/Getty Images
Through the course of its life so far, the World Test Championship has been kicked at, spit on, and abused. Back in November, the ICC's chairman claimed he wasn't sure if the Test Championship had "achieved what it intended to do". As recently as March, Virat Kohli said it didn't really motivate his team any more than usual. More recently, Stuart Broad asked why the Ashes couldn't be worth more points than a two-match Test series (the old "our series should count double" argument). All this while the competition survived a global pandemic, which threatened seriously to end it.
Kusal Mendis, Niroshan Dickwella and Danushka Gunathilaka have been sent home from the tour of England after having gone out towards the city centre in Durham, despite being told explicitly that such an excursion would violate the team's biosecure bubble. They were discovered after videos were posted on social media of them out in public.
But in the grand scheme of bad behaviour, Sri Lankan bubble poppers are probably small fry. They thought they could get away with it until someone recorded them. Shakib Al Hasan, meanwhile, knew for sure cameras were rolling and media were in attendance when he let his temper explode at a Dhaka Premier League game, first kicking the stumps when he had an appeal turned down, then uprooting them and throwing them into the pitch when the umpire dared to take the teams off the field for rain.
The Hundred is finally set to begin in July. It's been so long since the tournament was announced, everybody seems to have by now run out of comic material to throw at it. Kudos marketing geniuses who foresaw this.
Andrew Fidel Fernando is ESPNcricinfo's Sri Lanka correspondent. @afidelf