England are in last-chance saloon now...
IT COULDN’T happen again, could it? Are we about to go down the same miserable path trodden by Andrew Flintoff ’s England in 2006 and Alastair Cook’s broken team of four years ago? This is starting to feel like deja vu all over again.
It may seem premature to fear another 5-0 Ashes thrashing and all the recriminations that come with it after just one defeat where England competed well for the first three days yet wasted chances.
But the warning signs are there. This tour is unravelling at alarming speed and England will unravel with it, just as Cook’s team did so painfully, unless they get their act together. And fast.
What a mess England found themselves in here yesterday. First Australia rushed to a 10-wicket victory that verged on the humiliating after such an evenly-fought opening three days and then, worse, came the habitual off-field crisis.
We even found ourselves back at the same Brisbane hotel where, four years ago after heavy defeat at The Gabba, we were all summoned by the ECB to be told Jonathan Trott was going home. The tour never recovered from that.
This is nothing like as serious as Trott’s problems but ‘Butt-gate’ is the last thing England and Andrew Strauss, attempting to put out fires wherever he goes and later imposing a midnight curfew on the players, needed at such a key point of the most important Test series of them all.
For if Australia could be said to have played well at The Gabba then they had a blinder away from it in their handling of this bizarre sub-plots. There is no doubt that the question of whether Jonny Bairstow did or did not head-butt Cameron Bancroft in a Perth bar will enter English cricketing folklore as David Gower’s Tiger Moth or Flintoff’s pedalo have.
Truly, you could not make up much of what went on here yesterday and all of it played into the hands of Australia, who ended up laughing at an England side they sense are on the canvas.
If Bancroft, who marked his Test debut with an unbeaten 82, fails to become an international regular then he has a future in showbusiness. Yesterday he displayed the comic timing and dead-pan delivery of Steven Wright as he talked about Bairstow’s ‘weird and random’ greeting. If this were not so serious it would be tempting to laugh along, but, from something seemingly so innocuous, Strauss had to go into full-blown crisis mode yesterday, with the Ben Stokes saga still no nearer to being settled.
This is no repeat of the ugly incident in Bristol that finds Stokes waiting to see if he will be charged with assault or affray. And this is nothing like as bad as the clash between Joe Root and David Warner in Birmingham in 2013, however keen Australians are to compare the two.
Three witnesses told Sportsmail nothing happened between Bairstow and Bancroft and England’s security advisers did not feel the need to report it. And there is no doubt this incident would not be in the public domain had England not had the Stokes incident hanging over them.
But that does not excuse the fact that Bairstow, and what seems a large number of England cricketers, were in a bar popular with students in the early hours of the morning on their very first night in Australia. And this was when they knew the eyes of the cricketing world would be on their behaviour. How could they be so stupid? Or dumb, as the fuming Trevor Bayliss said. How could they let down the coaches and management who have tried to treat them like adults when all evidence suggests they need nannying?
It beggars belief that England could not find somewhere away from the spotlight if they just wanted to have ‘a couple of beers’. It is not as if Perth is a busy or vibrant place. It is full of quiet spots.
Sadly, they have now reached the stage where it is going to be difficult for them to leave their hotel rooms if they cannot be trusted to steer clear of the sort of situations that could spell trouble.
That is not to say Bairstow has done much wrong other than in his decision to be out late, so soon after the Stokes affair. Bairstow, who was in the bar with a mutual friend of Bancroft’s, does not dispute there was physical contact but certainly does not feel he butted the Australian. It was more a tap.
Perhaps the best description came from someone who was there when they said: ‘Jonny’s rugby mates bump heads to say thank you when someone buys them a drink. Odd, but there’s nothing malicious in it. They carried on drinking together.’
But England are drinking in the lastchance saloon now and both Bayliss and Strauss let them know it when they read the riot act in a team meeting yesterday in the same hotel room where Trott’s departure was announced. Everyone will be glad to see the back of the place.