Frankenstein’s monster is now at crossroads of life

WE have built up an image of Ben Stokes which we like and which we have encouraged. He is fiery and he is unpredictable and he is brutally brilliant and he absolutely will not suffer any provocation from anyone. Especially not Marlon Samuels. That is the Stokes we want to see.

It is one of the reasons Stokes has become such a cult figure in recent years. He is not clubbable. He is Roy Keane (pictured) in whites. He tells it how it is and he gets in your face and he gets aggressive. He is the opposite of the cricket establishment figure. On and off the pitch, he is the man you can’t control.

The public and the media have kept telling him that. And probably ‘mates’ like Alex Hales, who stand back and watch when the fireworks explode, have laughed about it, too.

Stokesy, eh. The crazy one. Don’t go near him if you know what’s good for you.

We tell Stokes he is dangerous and different because in this world of manufactured personalities and players who are scared to open their mouths or in thrall to their agents, and captains who won’t go on tour, that is what we want to believe.

He is a throwback, old school. And the problem for Stokes is that we have linked his on and off-field personas so that they are indistinguishable from each other.

The guy who likes getting tanked up and squaring up is linked in the public mind with the guy who is one of the most destructive players in the modern game.

Last weekend was the perfect example. Stokes’ face, set in a cold, hard stare, glowered from the front cover of a national newspaper’s magazine, glaring at the camera from behind a helmet grille. The headline said simply: The Hit Man. Underneath was another line. ‘Don’t mess with Ben Stokes. He’s fast and furious.’

We know what happened next. After England beat the West Indies in a one-day match in Bristol last Sunday, Stokes and several other England players went out for a night out. Stokes and Hales, who was pictured earlier in the evening grinning like an idiot into a camera, stayed out later than the rest and became involved in a brawl.

And suddenly we don’t like it so much. We decide that actually we don’t like this man-monster that we have created and that his savagery, transplanted on to the streets of Bristol in Freshers’ Week, is really rather uncouth and that Andrew Strauss should throw the book at him and he shouldn’t be let anywhere near the Ashes tour of Australia this winter.

Really? Whatever happened to ‘Don’t mess with Ben Stokes’?

I am not going to defend what Stokes did during the brawl, although it is worth pointing out that sections of video footage can be spliced and diced and never tell the full story.

Most of all, Stokes is an idiot for being there in the first place. When people are told ‘Don’t mess with Ben Stokes’, they want to mess with Ben Stokes. Particularly when they are wasted at the end of a night out.

People like Stokes are a magnet for trouble. There is always someone who wants to have a go. Like the guy who was waving the bottle around in the footage. They want to test the celebrity nutter.

And these days there is always a cameraphone around.

Stokes must have known that. He has good people around him, including his family and his manager Neil Fairbrother. He knew the pitfalls. He knew the dangers. But he ignored them.

It is said now that there is a wider drinking culture in English cricket and that Stokes’s misadventures were a symptom of that. I am not around the players enough to comment on that with authority but I have always found it refreshing when I have been on tours and seen the players wandering out to restaurants, mingling happily with the public.

They were treated like adults by the England management and they behaved like adults. The current group of players are good company, too, terrific cricketers and good blokes. Most of them, anyway.

That should not be lost in the furore, although one of the repercussions of what Stokes did will be a curtailing of the freedom of his colleagues. Which is a shame.

If there is a drinking culture, maybe we ought to look at the example Stokes has been set by his one-day captain, Eoin Morgan. Morgan’s Twitter feed sometimes reads like a paean to booze. It is spattered with enthusiastic references to Captain Morgan’s, a brand of rum he is paid to endorse. It is also worth remembering that soon after Stokes and his teammates arrived in Bangladesh last autumn for a tour that Morgan refused to lead, Morgan took to Twitter thanking Guinness for entertaining him at a jolly somewhere. I hope Stokes still goes to Australia for the Ashes but I understand the arguments that say he should not. I understand the arguments that say England will be on the back foot from the start if he is in the side, the Aussie media and public will have a field day and the England players will be under siege.

Perhaps it would be good for Stokes to see that. Perhaps it would be good for him to see the damage he has done. Perhaps it would make him stand up and play better than ever.

And perhaps it would make him realise that he is 26. It is time to stop listening to other people telling him he’s a wild man and hitman. It’s time to stop trying to live up to that. It is time to refuse to let anything else get in the way of his talent. It is time to forget ‘don’t mess with Ben Stokes’. It is time to grow up.