England's Booze Ban is Bazball's Delerium Tremens

PL on the the ECB's strict new curfew and drinking policy

Travis Head (146no) drinks a Guinness after day one of the WTC final at Lord’s, image from The Test documentary.

Having lost its way, English cricket has now officially lost its mind.

Rattled by a series of ill-disciplined incidents on and off the field, frustrated that a midnight curfew was not enough to correct the issues that have seen Bazball pivot from saviour to scourge, it has codified that controversial curfew and bolted on a booze ban just so everybody knows they’re really, really, really serious.

The head master is unhappy, and the whole class is in detention until grades improve.

The Telegraph’s Will Macpherson broke the story on Friday, reporting that a new set of rules, so extensive they are set out into two sections, have been imposed on England’s cricketers in the immediate aftermath of the incident involving captain Ben Stokes and bowler Gus Atkinson at a Chelsea nightclub.

The team’s reputation had already been called into question following a number of alcohol related incidents in the summer, one which involved white ball captain Harry Brook on the eve of an ODI, and the other involving Ben Duckett during the team’s mid-Ashes holiday.

The curfew was the first acknowledgement of a team culture gone awry and an administration that was trying to wrest back lost control; the drinking ban is a doubling down on that.

Macpherson reports that the first section of the new rules state that for “every day of an England men’s home series and tour”:

• The midnight curfew is in place

• Players cannot appear under the influence of alcohol in public, or post on social media about any “alcohol-related material or activities”

• Players must inform the team management or security if they are out of the hotel after 10pm, including changes of plan.

But, wait, there’s more. The second section deals with a set of recommendations and more onerous restrictions that apply “from the day before the start of any match until the end of the day after that match has finished”:

• “We recommend that no alcohol be consumed”

• Players cannot drink at all in public, including public areas of the team hotel, unless “specifically approved by Key or head coach Brendon McCullum”

• Players are “strongly discouraged” from consuming alcohol in private in this period because “preparation, recovery and professionalism must take priority”.

Asked to clarify what happens when a match finishes on day five, the ECB confirmed that the ban continues for day six.

The codification follows confusion that saw its captain exploit a loophole when called out for breaching the curfew which he’d reportedly helped craft.

Drinking isn’t the problem for this team or its management. It probably couldn’t even be categorised as a symptom of the problem. It wasn’t drinking that cost England the Ashes, so much as a lack of “preparation” and “professionalism”.

You have to wonder if England’s players are being treated as children because they have behaved as such, or England team management has turned 180 degrees from its libertarian stylings to something more befitting a reform school as a way of appeasing their employers, and presumably hanging on to their jobs.