England are an accident in waiting due to lads on tour culture
THE comedian Bill Hicks had a phrase to describe the extent of his drug intake. ‘ No more,’ he would say, ‘ than the average touring funk band.’
Trevor Bayliss, coach of England’s cricketers, had a Hicks moment yesterday, addressing the issue of a drinking culture inside his squad. Except in his mind, he wasn’t joking.
‘They drink no more or less than any team I’ve ever known,’ Bayliss insisted. He meant it as a defence, but it is quite possibly the problem.
The same question, asked of any coach in just about any sport, would have elicited one response. The modern squad would be the best behaved the coach had worked with. The most professional, the fittest, the least likely to consume alcohol, smoke, or eat the wrong foods; more familiar with yoga mats than beer mats.
If the England group currently touring Australia remain as keen on a night out as, say, Bayliss’s New South Wales team from 2004, or even his Sydney Sixers of 2011, the messages are not getting through.
For all his mitigating arguments, it is plain Bayliss is apoplectic that another big night out risks undermining his meticulous preparation.
Jonny Bairstow’s bizarre greeting for Australian batsman Cameron Bancroft pales beside Ben Stokes’ alleged assault in Bristol, but the nuisance value is enough to enrage England’s management. Expletives were flying freely off camera, as were adjectives such as ‘dumb’ and ‘stupid’ on it.
Bairstow, in a bar on his first night in Australia, had presented the hosts with an opportunity to unsettle and damage England.
Andrew Strauss, director of England cricket, said he needed the players to be smarter and more aware of the prevailing mood.
‘The world has moved on and certainly in the light of what has happened to Ben Stokes there is attention on us that wasn’t there previously,’ he explained. ‘We need to move with that — it’s crystal clear to the guys now that if you put yourself in a position where people can have a go at you, they’ll take it. This is an incident of our own making.’
The liberal argument, supported by Strauss, is that it is unrealistic to depart on what is basically a five-month tour and expect everyone involved to remain teetotal, although Moeen Ali does it.
Surely, however, it depends on the impact these recreational late nights are having on the team. Curfews are irrelevant if the players do not find trouble. England, however, have become accidents waiting to happen.
Stokes is sweating on a serious assault charge; Bairstow is on the front page of every Australian newspaper and is now a mark for the sharp-tongued opposition. They rattled him during England’s second innings and he lost his wicket cheaply.
So, in these circumstances, the issue of temperance is not actually unthinkable. It is not as if England have shown they can hold their drink. Quite the opposite, in fact.
It is not as if alcohol has had a positive impact on team morale and bonding. Quite the opposite, when this squad is considerably weakened by the absence of Stokes.
The players can’t live like monks for five months, it is said, but the Bairstow incident happened nearer to five hours after setting foot in the country. They can go five hours surely? Recovering alcoholics could probably go five hours.
‘There’s a balance to achieve,’ said Strauss. ‘It’s impossible to stay in a hotel room for five months and keep your sanity. I know that for a fact. People have to be allowed a degree of freedom to go out, and it would be a great shame to go on tour and not be allowed out. But there is no way you can, or should, be putting yourself, your team, the ECB or the sport in a position where people are making judgments.
‘ The players have been told about this before and they’ll be told about it again. I’ll make it absolutely clear what the rules and regulations are. There will be no grey areas.’
Yet there are grey areas. Codes of conduct that were still being written when this latest debacle occurred — it must have come as such a shock when they finally got to the section about not head-butting the opposition — plus the idea that the squad would be self-policing.
Bayliss made plain that all of it was up for review in a tone that suggested there was a new sheriff in town. Is it too much to ask that well-rewarded athletes can be allowed out without the night ending in physical violence, though?
Bairstow may have meant no malice, but he took a liberty with Bancroft. Those with knowledge of previous Australian openers say that on other tours, a cordial head-butt would not have been dismissed as weirdo banter. ‘Try it with Justin Langer,’ one former employee of Cricket Australia remarked.
Plainly the demands of a cricket tour are unique and it is impossible to operate like, say, a football club, whose trips during the season last no more than two days and include no down time.
England’s cricketers have to be given the opportunity to break out of the work environment; yet trust has not sat well with them.
Bayliss and Strauss clearly feel very let down that, still clearing up after Stokes, they have had another mess dropped on their doorstep.
‘ We have got to understand and recognise that sport is moving on,’ Strauss added. ‘ What might have been acceptable back in the old days is no longer acceptable. ‘We, in the England team, and cricket as a sport need to move along with that as well. I’ll be reminding the players of their obligations.
‘They need to be smarter. That’s the reality. They’re intelligent adults and at times they are not using that intelligence in the right way. This is a distraction, isn’t it? It’s a distraction we could well have done without and it’s a distraction we talked about before the series, making sure it doesn’t happen.
‘This is a challenge no different
to facing a fast bowler, and we have to adapt. In every other measure, our team has moved forward. If you look at fitness tests over the last two years, we’ve gone up substantially, the guys are far more professional in how they go about their business.
‘But there is far more attention on the players and less of an opportunity to be incognito. It’s really simple — and the guys need to understand that. If you’re not putting yourself in a position to be shot down, it won’t happen. I don’t think we’re different to any other team, or any other sport.’
But that isn’t quite true. Cricket is different. Due to the long months away it has retained a ‘lads- ontour’ culture that even rugby has slowly abandoned.
The initial explanation of Bairstow’s bizarre greeting for Bancroft was that he was indulging in some ‘rugby-style’ horseplay. Yet when cricket ends up discredited, it cannot be rugby that is to blame.
The Bairstow saga should fade in significance after today, as England turn their attention towards the second Test in Adelaide, but the wider cultural issues remain.
If the standards haven’t evolved since Bayliss started coaching, that is problematic. England’s cricketers are not just any old touring funk band.