Sky News host Rowan Dean says Australia and India’s cricket teams can now add “swash-buckling virtue-signalling” to their resumes claiming it is foolish, dangerous, and wrong for elite athletes to pander to the Black Lives Matter movement.

According to cricket.com.au, Australia and India came together before the match “in a powerful and united stance against racism”, while acknowledging the traditional owners of the land by standing in a Barefoot Circle.

“This is, of course, the underarm bowling version of taking a knee, the so-called gesture favoured by Black Lives Matter and other such Marxist groups as some form of submission to the over-riding precept of critical race theory, namely that white people are and have always been intrinsically racist,” Mr Dean said.

“Not even vaguely aware of the irony of this concept, Black Lives Matter aficionados fervently preach that white people have something intrinsically evil in their genetic make-up which makes them inherently racist.

“In America, and elsewhere, it is now demanded of sportsmen and women that they must prostrate themselves to this insidious creed with some gesture or other before every match.

“But the political organisation Black Lives Matter has no such concerns, and is only interested in creating havoc and mayhem and sowing anarchy.”

Mr Dean said at the heart of critical race theory was a “pernicious and sinister dogma” now being preached in schools and universities.