You Can’t Put a Curfew on a Cricketer

Musings on England’s nightclub incident from an anonymous former Australian Test cricketer

Ben Stokes walked out of Lord’s on Sunday afternoon, having just led his team to victory over New Zealand by 115 runs, and said - out loud, into a microphone, with journalists present - that he was going to go and share ‘a proper beer with the boys’.

Twelve hours later, the ECB are clutching their pearls like a Rotary Club treasurer who’s just found a durry in the raffle tin because he did precisely that.

Spare me.

Look, I don’t have any particular view on the specifics of what went on at the nightclub in question. I was asleep at the time. Or maybe I wasn’t. The timezones are all over the shop. But from what I gather, Gus Atkinson had a disagreement with some rugby player at a nightclub, who attempted to throw a punch at him, missed, and chinned some dopey ECB security guard instead.

I don’t blame Stokes or Atkinson for this. They’d just won a Test match, so obviously they’re out on the tiles. Sure, it was another one of the Poms’ coin toss victories where they jag a few lucky breaks on a lottery pitch and claim that they’ve now cracked Test match cricket. But, fair play to them, they have to take what they can get at this point. Plus, it was Ben’s birthday. So of course they were out celebrating like they’ve just found a lobster in an old pair of shorts. Why wouldn’t they be?

I don’t blame the rugby player for throwing a punch either. Who among us can honestly say they haven’t wanted to take a swing at an England bowler every now and then? Bloody hell, I spent half my playing career trying to think of a way to go the knuckle on Andy Caddick.

And the security guard? Sure, he needed stitches, but you’d think a man being paid by Rob Key to babysit adult professional cricketers on their night off knows he’s signed up for the odd bit of biffo.

And now, for some reason, because of all this, some nosy prick going by the name of The Cricket Regulator is involved. The Cricket fucken Regulator? Mate. ‘Oh, don’t mind me, chaps. I’m just here to regulate your cricket. The last thing you want your cricket to be is unregulated.’ Piss off back to wherever you came from, you lanyard-chewing stickybeak.

Now, you’re probably thinking this is another chapter in a long and sorry story of England cricketers embarrassing themselves off the field. And obviously it is. There’s no denying that. It’s humiliating as fuck.

But, and I can’t stress this enough, Stokes told them beforehand. He stood there on Sunday and said ‘I’m going to have a beer with the boys.’ Clear as a cucumber. The ECB heard that and presumably thought ‘yes, lovely, perhaps a quiet pint at the hotel bar, home by nine, lights out, lovely.’ Fuck me, lads. That’s not what ‘a proper beer with the boys’ means. Not that I’d know, I stopped celebrating birthdays at age eleven. But it’s pretty bloody obvious he’s planning to kick on.

Now, yes, technically there was a curfew in place. But who the fuck cares? As far as I’m concerned, curfews are for boarding schools and ankle bracelet wearers. Not worth the alarm clock they’re written on. Besides, Stokes had a hand in putting the bloody thing in place, so it makes sense that he can bin it if and when he sees fit.

The curfew was only there to pacify the bloody do-gooders after the Harry Brook carry-on in New Zealand, anyway. And now, if Stokes steps down, Brook will replace him. Proper Alanis Morissette areas of irony, that. Shit-tons of spoons when a knife’s all you're looking for. Still, this is what fucken curfews get you. And, at this point, it wouldn’t surprise if Brook celebrates his ascension to the England captaincy for the next Test in a manner that sees him immediately suspended from the captaincy for the next Test. Courtesy of our lord and saviour, The Cricket Regulator.

Look, here’s my advice to the ECB, for what it’s worth, coming from a former Australian Test cricketer who has never lost a microsecond of sleep over England’s disciplinary procedures. Give it away. You cannot legislate sober behaviour into a mob of pissheads. Especially not with Baz McCullum in charge, egging them on the whole time. You can write it in the team handbook, you can have the security guard standing there, blowing his whistle at midnight until he’s blue in the face, like he’s stumbled into a fucken Cinderella pantomime. You can slap fines on them. You can wag your finger at them. You can ‘regulate’ all you like. And at the end of it all, Ben Stokes is still going to have a proper beer with the boys. That’s who he is. And that’s who his team is.

So let them party. Let them fight. Let them go to nightclubs. Let them get drunkenly lost in Noosa. Let them select Zak Crawley. Stop being so uptight.

The ECB’s real embarrassment here isn’t that Stokes broke curfew or that a boofhead prop forward tried to deck Atkinson. It’s that you’re still acting surprised by it. You look like absolute dills hiring cricket regulators and punching-bag minders, screaming into the void, fighting against the inevitable. Ask King fucken Canute how that worked out. Here’s a clue: not fucken well. You just come across as a sub-committee of officious little wowsers, having an attack of the vapours at the notion that the skipper of your cricket team might want to go clubbing because he’s won a Test for once, despite his shithouse batting and captaincy, and happened to stumble into an impromptu three a.m. rugby match alongside the only bloke in the team who had the common fucken decency to hang out with him. That’s the real scandal, and every press release you spew forth from your high performance printers makes it worse. Stop kidding yourselves and get behind your team for once in your tiny-minded lives.

Oh, and happy birthday, Ben.