2 hours ago
5
The laws of cricket run to more than 200 pages. The International Cricket Council’s Test playing regulations fill another 125, the anti-doping code packs another 66, the code of conduct is 44 more, illegal bowling actions 37, kit and equipment 36. You’d be hard pressed to find one single rule anywhere among them as silly as the one we know Ben Stokes has just broken, which stipulates that players can’t stay out past midnight. And yes, that does include ICC clothing regulation 19.45, which says that the maximum size of the manufacturer’s label permitted on ankle of players’ socks is two square inches.
So far as we know, the only thing Stokes has done wrong is break this self-imposed curfew. That may change. The investigation may reveal more details about his alleged involvement in an altercation involving a rugby player. But if there was one very clear lesson from the last time Stokes was involved in a situation such as this, at Embargo nightclub in 2017, it is that it’s worth waiting for the facts. But the drums have already started thumping. Dread phrases such as “hanging by a thread” and “hard to see how he can continue” were all over the press.
Let’s take a second to rub our knuckles against our heads about this mess which, given Harry Brook’s encounter with a nightclub bouncer, is only the second-most stupid thing a member of their senior leadership team has done in a nightclub this winter.
That done, let’s ask if Stokes really needs to be banged out of his job because he was in a club four days after his 35th birthday, the evening after his team had just secured their first victory in six months, while he was accompanied by a security officer? Fine him if you need to. Drop him if you have to. He has broken a couple of his coach’s best maxims: “nothing good happens after midnight” and “don’t do anything that will land you on the front pages”. But let’s not pretend that, on the evidence of what’s known, it needs to cost him his job.
Especially when the mere fact that Stokes, and team security, ignored the rule to begin with tells you all you need to know about how seriously everyone appeared to be taking it.
The problem here isn’t so much that Stokes broke a curfew. It’s that to begin with, England’s management decided to set one. This Cinderella rule was brought in so they could be seen to be doing something after their own bad management during England’s winter tour, in particular their failed attempt to cover up that situation with Brook, and their decision to send the players away for four nights of rest and recuperation in Noosa, a place best known for its beach, bars, and craft beer scene. This ECB regime may be the first in history whose biggest failing seems to have been that they could organise a piss-up in a brewery.
There were an awful lot of problems with that Ashes tour, and England’s drinking comes a way down the second page. It is a long way after their preparation, which included one solitary knockabout match in a public park against their second XI. It’s below the squad selection, which somehow managed to leave out anyone who knew how to use a new ball, included a spinner they didn’t think they could pick, and omitted a reserve wicketkeeper they came to badly need. And it’s behind an approach to coaching that apparently involved actively not discussing the ways in which the players kept getting out.
Owning up to any of this, though, would require someone else in the hierarchy to put their head on the block, the managing director, perhaps, the head coach, maybe, even their chair or chief executive. So far the only bloke who actually seems to have shouldered any of the responsibility for what went wrong seems to have been Zak Crawley, for the unusual crime of being the team’s third-leading run‑scorer on tour. Other changes have included bringing in walkie‑talkies, hiring a chef and two new assistant coaches, and introducing that curfew. It’s precisely because the management fudged the fallout from it all that there’s so much lingering anger in English cricket, anger which is now being aimed at their captain.
If team spirit is an illusion glimpsed in the aftermath of victory, team culture has become the excuse you use in the aftermath of defeat. If you’ve been listening, the England management have basically already told us the entire thing is an exercise in public relations with their repeated explanations that the team need to “rebuild trust” and “reconnect with the public”, which now seem to be the biggest single reason why Stokes is supposed to go.
Well, so far as reconnecting with the public goes, staying out for a beer is actually not a bad idea.
Has anyone from the ECB actually been in the stands to watch one of the matches they put on? The Lord’s Test is one long piss-up. They buy in 300,000 pints for every Test. The place has an entire garden that you can only get into if you buy a bottle of champagne. In Stokes’s time, the ECB has had an official ale, an official lager, and an official cider, right now it has both an official wine partner and an official sparkling wine partner. The day before the Test, MCC put out a press release celebrating their new partnership with Guinness.
The England team don’t have a drinking culture. English cricket is a drinking culture. No one would give a damn if they had only won the Ashes back. Instead of addressing any of these myriad issues, the ECB’s senior leadership are busy worrying whether their players are in bed by midnight, like they’re running a team of 16‑year‑olds on a school tour.
