Rerooted

GH meets the new boss, same as the old boss

Back to the future

When Ben Stokes promised to fuck some shit up, he would not have had this in mind. After a scandal so third-rate it has yet even to justify a -gate suffix, England’s captain has, with Gus Atkinson, been deemed ineligible for selection in next week’s Oval Test. Rather than anoint a successor, the England Cricket Board have appointed a locum: England’s most experienced captain, Joe Root.

It’s probably, as Athers concludes, the best of a range of bad options. England keep Stokes; England keep white ball skipper Harry Brook waiting for his red ball commission. It would have been ludicrous to promote the latter when, as Cam pointed out yesterday, the indulgence of his follies in New Zealand set the whole fiasco in Chelsea in motion by resulting in the imposition of the curfew that Stokes and Atkinson breached.

Stokes has been extended a lot of sympathy these past few days, which I’m afraid I only partly share. Who celebrates winning the first Test of a congested Test series with a full day’s drinking? The Saracens’ season was at least over; England’s was just beginning. There is enough research into the impact of alcohol on sleep, and on performance, to discourage a rum-and-coke diet. There is also enough experience in the England dressing room for some other member of the team, perhaps even Root, to have reminded Stokes that those precious team protocols applied to him as well. Perhaps Stokes is agin the curfew management has imposed; if so, the adult response would have been to argue for its repeal, not to ignore it so ostentatiously. I wonder whether the endless deference to Stokes hasn’t instilled in him a sense of impunity; I also wonder also whether he hasn’t developed a propensity for self-harm that can also manifest on the cricket field. So, yet again, England find themselves in a mire of their own making. Sympathy shouldn’t be anyone’s first response.

“Are you captain or am I?”

That said, sacking or retirement would have been a squalid end to a magnificent career, and these things do matter to the fabric of a game. What with all that experience of royal funerals, England does manage cricket farewells pretty well, and Stokes’s deserves to be best of all. Still, on the evidence of this week, the planning had better start soon. Certainly next year’s Ashes looks a long way away.