MIDNIGHT CURFEW
Strauss keeps England on short leash for good after Stokes incident
England face a permanent curfew as a legacy of the Ben Stokes affair that ‘changed their world’ this winter. as Stokes prepared to make his Test comeback in the early hours of today after the Bristol fracas that ruled him out of the ashes and landed him in court, it emerged that there will be lasting ramifications from the controversy.
The midnight curfew that team director andrew Strauss imposed on the players during the ashes is to stay in place not just for the rest of this winter, but beyond.
Strauss acted after the first ashes Test in Brisbane in november when it emerged that Jonny Bairstow was involved in a late-night bar incident with australia’s Cameron Bancroft on England’s first night of the tour.
Then matters got worse when Ben duckett, who was in australia with the lions, was sent home for throwing a pint of beer over Jimmy anderson in the same Perth bar ahead of England’s warm-up match before the last three Tests.
It was felt Strauss might relax the order, which applies equally to team management, once the furore over Stokes had died down. But clearly he wants to continue cracking down on cricket’s drink culture and will keep the curfew in place for all future home and away series.
It was former captain alastair Cook who said that England’s ‘world had changed’ when what would once have been considered an innocuous incident between Bairstow and Bancroft had been magnified in light of the Stokes incident.
now, England clearly want to hammer home how important it is for their players to stay out of bars late at night even though there has been no suggestion that any of them have stepped out of line so far in new Zealand.
Stokes has his young family with him in auckland. and the all-rounder will be meeting up with his extended family in his native Christchurch next week where his parents still live.
He has not confined himself to the team hotel since re-joining the team but has been noticeably quiet off the field, with a court case for affray hanging over him in august.
Joining up with the England party ahead of the first Test was Somerset spinner Jack leach.
If things had been different, he would have already had a full tour of India under his belt.
But, after being the obvious choice as a replacement for the injured Zafar ansari in late 2016, the results of a routine test on his bowling action at loughborough emerged.
‘It was actually a test for all sorts of things that lions bowlers undertook, biomechanics and avoiding stress fractures, and part of it was how many degrees your arm bent,’ said leach after arriving here on the eve of the first Test as a replacement for the injured Mason Crane. ‘When I got my result back it was just complete shock.’
The result turned leach’s world upside down as what was thought to be a model slow left-arm action was found to be illegal because his arm bent more than 15 degrees. He was labelled with the worst of all stigmas — that of a chucker.
‘I’d never been called for throwing or anything like that,’ said leach. ‘There were never any mutterings. So I just had to sort it out. The biggest thing I didn’t like was it felt like cheating and that wasn’t something I was trying to do. I wasn’t trying to gain an advantage, I just didn’t understand my bowling well enough.’
at the time the Somerset spinner, prolific on the turning pitches of Taunton in 2016, had a very big question mark over his domestic, let alone international, future.
‘I managed to sort it out quite quickly and what I went through made me understand my bowling a lot better,’ he said.
‘It’s made me a better bowler because it was only a good thing to discover there was a problem. Having a stronger and smoother action was what was going to help me, not a questionable one. It probably pushed me on. Even though it felt like a big thing it was actually quite a small thing when you broke it down.
‘I got re-tested in the January after and all my deliveries were legitimate but it wasn’t until the back end of last season that I started to feel mentally back to normal.
‘It was more the mental rather than the physical aspect of it, getting used to feeling I could just bowl normally again. I’ve had to be resilient.’
leach took 51 first division wickets with his remodelled action last summer and was the only lions player to emerge with any credit from their 3-0 thrashing against West Indies this winter, taking 18 wickets in three ‘Tests’ to Crane’s one in two games. now he is where he has always wanted to be.
‘It is a nice moment but it’s just a step in the direction I want to go,’ leach said.