I can’t be the only person baffled by the court case that saw a violent and drunken England cricket star walk free ...

THE cricketer Ben Stokes has been unanimously found not guilty of affray by a jury at Bristol Crown Court after a brief deliberation. He could not have wished for a better verdict.

Like anyone judged innocent, he is entitled to resume his life and career. The public’s memory of the fight outside the Mbargo nightclub in Bristol last September will fade.

Yet I can’t be the only person more than somewhat baffled by the affair. This is not to query the jurors in any way. They sat through days of detailed evidence before arriving at their considered judgment.

The fact remains that, although a very violent public fight took place in which Stokes and others were involved, no one has been held culpable, far less found guilty of a crime. This strikes me as odd.

In particular, there are several unanswered questions. Some concern a number of what appear to be woeful prosecution errors. Others have to do with the mystifying inconsistencies of the cricket authorities, who embraced Stokes with unseemly haste following his acquittal on Tuesday.

And while the cricketer’s exoneration cannot be overemphasised, I would still argue that his general behaviour — not least his spectacular drinking — has brought the game of cricket into disrepute.

Let me deal first with the apparent mistakes of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). On the morning the trial began last week, prosecutors tried to lay two more serious charges against Stokes in view of the severity of the injuries sustained by former soldier Ryan Hale and his friend Ryan Ali during the brawl.

Judge Peter Blair QC rightly said that bringing forward counts of assault occasioning bodily harm at the last minute would be unfair to Stokes and his legal team.

But why did the CPS seek to introduce these serious — and some would say appropriate — charges at such a late stage? It is pretty incomprehensible.

Equally, it’s almost impossible to make sense of the decision not to charge Stokes’s friend and fellow England player, Alex Hales. He is shown in a video of the incident apparently kicking Ryan Ali, who sustained a fractured eye socket and a swelling behind an ear. The CPS claims it was Avon and Somerset Police who decided not to press charges.

Interestingly, Stokes’s lawyer suggested during the trial that Ryan Ali’s injuries might have been partly caused by Hales, and therefore not entirely by his client. Yet Hales was neither arrested nor charged.

A further conundrum was the CPS’s failure to call two men, Kai Barry and William O’Connor, to give evidence even though they were at the Mbargo club, and central to events.

Stokes claimed he jumped to their defence after they were subjected to homophobic taunts from Hale and Ali, while the Mbargo club’s doorman maintained the cricketer had initially mocked them. Barry and O’Connor have endorsed Stokes’s version of events while offering seemingly conflicting accounts of their exact whereabouts at the club. Incidentally, it doesn’t help those of us attempting to wend our way through this murky affair that in a small cast of characters there should be a man called Hale and another named Hales, while two men boast the first name of ‘Ryan’.

No doubt the CPS has a justification for its apparent mistakes, but there would seem to have been a series of misjudgments which collectively may have undermined the cause of justice. Will anyone be required to take responsibility? I doubt it.

Let us now examine the character of Ben Stokes. Innocent though he has been declared to be, the video evidence of him inflicting such violence against Hale and Ali (both men were knocked out) will be shocking to some, even though he was judged to have been acting in self-defence.

Although he denied he was drunk, he had by his own account consumed two or three pints of lager and five or six vodka and lemonades during the hours before the fight, as well as an unspecified number of ‘Jagerbombs’ (a potent mixture of shots of liqueur with a high- energy drink) inside the Mbargo club.

Even if this was an accurate record of his intake (drinkers are sometimes prone to underestimate their consumption), it was a reckless amount to have imbibed in the space of a few hours — neither conducive to balanced judgment nor, one would have thought, good for his body. God knows, I’m the last man in the world to cast the first stone when it comes to drinking too much, but Stokes does seem to have a taste for the stuff which may not be ideal in a professional sportsman who is one of the best cricketers in the world.

In 2011, he was arrested during a night out in Cumbria. In 2013, he and another cricketer were sent home from an England Lions tour of Australia for persistent latenight drinking.

As RECENTLY as August last year, he was caught boozing in Manchester until 3am, hours before the second day of the fourth test against South Africa.

I hope I’m not being unfair to Stokes in suggesting that excessive drinking hardly makes him a perfect role model for aspiring young cricketers. When he finds himself involved, however blamelessly, in a brutal punch-up in the early hours, his example is even more harmful.

If only he could have brought himself to say the word ‘sorry’, that would have made a world of difference. But he left it to his lawyer to make a statement bereft of any regret while he stared truculently at the camera.

Other cricketers have drunk a lot over the years, but I can’t think of any who have combined public excess with rowdiness to the same degree. Such behaviour would be rare in a professional footballer, a breed more commonly associated with oafish antics.

And I doubt whether a footballer cleared in similar circumstances would have been so swiftly clasped to the bosom of football panjandrums as Stokes was by cricketing ones. They announced his selection for the third test against India on Saturday less than two hours after his acquittal.

How erratically the England and Wales Cricket Board ( ECB) has behaved since Stokes’s fight came to light. First he was rightly banished from the Ashes tour of Australia, to the obvious detriment of England’s fortunes.

Then, for no apparent reason, he was allowed to play in New Zealand, as he was in test matches this summer, even though no trial had taken place. The moment he is acquitted, the ECB welcomes him back into the fold.

And yet it still has a disciplinary process which is supposed to consider whether, although found not guilty, Stokes has brought the game of cricket into disrepute.

It seems to me that is exactly what he has done. He is not a criminal but he is a fool and a bad example, and he should be censured and punished by the ECB before being allowed to continue his career.

Or are the modern authorities so obsessed with money, and so concerned with winning at all costs, that they will cheerfully sacrifice the honour and reputation of cricket?