Last Orders

GH on cricket and alcohol

‘You don’t want to play for England. You just want to piss it up the wall with your mates and have a good time.’ It was February 2013. The speaker was Andy Flower, who was sending home addressee Ben Stokes and teammate Matt Coles from a Lions tour of Australia for their drunken indiscretions. Stokes, he recalls in his autobiography, remonstrated fiercely: he did want to play for England; he would go on to be vindicated. Coles, by contrast, never did, his career petering out in county cricket five years ago.

Harry Brook and Ben Duckett already play for England, so presumably want to. They have a funny way of showing it. Brook, Stokes’s vice-captain, has been fined an eye-watering sum for a nightclub altercation four months ago in New Zealand; Stokes had already had to wrap his tattooed arms round Duckett, after a social media video circulated of the batter seemingly blind drunk. The way the fine on Brook was held over until the end of the tour suggests that the England Cricket Board understood its gravity; the way it failed to act as a caution in the meantime is additionally troubling.

There is a degree of inevitability about such inquests. After heavy defeat comes the search for reasons that extend beyond what one has been able to see with one’s own eyes. This Punch cartoon, ‘The Cause of Defeat’, was printed after Drewy Stoddart’s Englishmen lost 1895’s Fourth Test.