Stokes displays English disease of flair coupled to fecklessness
England’s all-rounder is following in the sorry national tradition of Rooney, Flintoff and Gascoigne where skill is matched by an urge to selfdestruct
It would take a brave astrologist to have foretold Ben Stokes’ fortunes in the stars these past few days. “Gemini: A new moon, coupled with the autumnal equinox, produces a moment teeming with possibilities. That dream you had of glories in a faraway land? It awaits you under pristine southern-hemisphere skies. Be wary, though, of temptations closer to home. In particular, try to avoid a tear-up outside a Bristol Paperchase at 2.35am on Monday.”
Alas, the conundrum of the English sporting maverick cannot be solved by clairvoyance alone. It seems increasingly as if it is our cross to bear.
Stokes, to judge by his latest antics, fits a time-honoured template perfectly: a high-grade talent let down by low-rent scrapes. One minute, he is
They know the perils of a night out and yet still stride towards them, like moths to a lantern
preparing to assume a pivotal role on his second Ashes tour, top of the bill at all the great citadels of Australian cricket. The next, he is apparently filmed firing off a flurry of punches in the dingy shadows of a provincial stationer, breaking every code of conduct and a finger on his bowling hand, too.
The question, as always, is why? Why, for an elite sportsman at a critical juncture in his career, does even the mental image of a nightclub visit not light up like a Times Square billboard to warn, in 10-storey letters, “This is a bad idea”? Stokes is due to be married in a fortnight’s time. He is 26, just a few months older than Sir Ian Botham was when he marmalised the Australians at Headingley in 1981. He is also a young man of such coiled belligerence that Graeme Swann once had to fend off opposition sledgers for their own well-being. Where better to head, then, than Mbargo in Bristol, whose evenings are variously headlined “Shenanigans” and “Cheap Thrills”.
It is tempting to invoke the wisdom of Harry Redknapp on these occasions. Unashamedly old-school in many ways, Redknapp was a disciplinarian when it came to drink. He was justly contemptuous of players badgering him to approve a lairy Christmas party in the most congested period of the calendar. While at Tottenham, he said, in his inimitable style: “I wouldn’t go out and get drunk, falling around and pulling some old slag. I’m not that stupid. Even if you wanted to do it, somebody would catch you out. Having said that, Tiger Woods didn’t do too badly.”
No, but at least Woods knew better than to hover around the doorsteps of nightclubs. The story has it that when the young Tiger turned up in Dubai, on one of his first foreign forays, Darren Clarke (who else?) was desperate to take him out on the tiles. Woods, by all accounts, wanted to join in, but knew that his fame and the prospect of prying lenses prohibited it.
With our mercurial sporting poster boys, the equation is reversed. They know the perils of a night out without curfew and yet they still stride heedlessly towards them, like moths to a lantern.
It is an English disease. Take Wayne Rooney, who has written the manual on how genius can be warped by doltishness. He begins his season buoyed by the romance of two comeback goals for Everton, basking in renewed acclaim as the last of the great street footballers. Then he heads, innocuously enough, to an Italian restaurant in Alderley Edge. Six hours later, though, and he has moved on, ominously, to the nearby bar. Four hours after that, he is sinking cocktails in Wilmslow. Then he steps into a car belonging to a woman who is not his wife, and the whole tapestry of a midlife renaissance comes unstitched. Quite a feat, really, for a Thursday.
For Rooney, the journey from the adoring stands at Goodison Park to a date at Stockport Magistrates’ Court is a short one. But it is a pattern repeated far too often among his fellow mavericks to be considered coincidental.
Stokes, despite his abysmal lapse in judgment, is hardly the first home-grown cricketer to fall foul of a night carousing with the lads. He is not even the first England all-rounder. What, for instance, would you consider the abiding image of Andrew Flintoff? That of him mock-bowing with his arms akimbo, having taken Peter Siddle’s wicket at Lord’s? Or the one of his hung-over dishevelment at 10 Downing Street in 2005, with eyes so pink they looked as if they had just been sandpapered?
True to English tradition, Flintoff ’s excess was tolerated as a corollary of his talent. He could be forgiven, just about, for riding the waves off St Lucia on a pedalo at 4am, so long as he took a five-for in his next match. To clip his wings too much, or so it was painted, would be to risk compromising the fearless, lord-of-the-knees-up act that made him such a force on the field. Bizarre drunken escapades, in other words, were just an expression of his swashbuckling sporting persona. And so it is with Stokes. Andrew Strauss might recoil from him throwing haymakers in the street, but he knows England can ill afford to be without this same pugilist’s intensity come the first morning at The Gabba.
From George Best to Paul Gascoigne, Danny Cipriani to Ben Stokes, English sport is littered with characters predisposed to self-destruct at the least opportune moments. It happens so frequently, sermonising feels futile. Soon enough, Stokes will be compelled to acknowledge that he has let his team-mates down, his family down – you know the rest. But while the temptation is to depict him as a tearaway, the reality is that he conforms to a national archetype, where his fecklessness is almost directly proportional to his flair.