A day in the life of English cricket, September 2017: anatomy of a shemozzle. Three hours before the fourth one-day international was due to start, with the skies above Kennington still bearded in white autumnal fog, an unusually thick knot of reporters and camera crews was already gathered in the bowels of The Oval deep below the rush-hour traffic, fussing and fluttering and brandishing their recorders.
This had been billed originally as a cosy morning briefing on the Ashes squad, with a ring of soft chairs ranged chummily around the hard floor of the Ken Barrington practice dungeon. In the circumstances, entering, as we are, the post-Mbargo landscape, it was deemed more appropriate for James Whitaker and top-table guest Andrew Strauss to mount the plinth and address the floor from behind a table.
And so began another one of those ECB press conferences. You know the ones. From KP’s texts, to Ashes Meltdown, to Joe Root at the Walkabout, to emergency relief on The Oval square, to the current nightlife-related inanities, there have been a fair few in the last five years. This one was right up there on its own, more studied terms, a two-pronged exercise in obfuscation, damage-limitation and pure straight-bat doublespeak.
Naturally Strauss was present to discuss, or not discuss, Ben Stokes and The Bad things No One Can Talk About Yet. First up, though, was Whitaker, there to explain and add detail to the morning’s Ashes squad announcement. This the national selector did with some apparent reluctance, answering questions about the most prestigious touring party in English cricket with all the obvious relish of a municipal official wheeled out to explain that the local watercourse has been flooded with 400 tons of decaying fish heads but this is all part of a wider plan, the beaches will be open as usual and really it’s all very positive.
Not that any of the current confusion is Whitaker’s fault. Unless, of course, you count his role in two successive slightly bizarre Ashes tour selections. Whitaker also helped finalise the loads-of-tall-blokes policy before the calamitous 5-0 whitewash in 2013-2014, when Boyd Rankin, Chris Tremlett and Steven Finn travelled to Australia and either forgot how to bowl or never played again.
Four years on, looking a little glum at his dais, Whitaker explained that picking James Vince, who hasn’t had a sniff since the summer of 2016, was “part of a process” and “a review” and was in fact the end point of a masterful process of elimination. As opposed to, say, a bit of a panic when everyone else has already failed.
A bit later Whitaker explained that the famously front-foot Vince was a natural back-foot player and therefore ideally suited to Australian pitches, which will be news to anyone who has ever watched him repeatedly driving through the off-side. Craig Overton had been picked for his feistiness and aggression, which are undoubted and indeed formally documented. Overton bowled with aggression and lift at The Oval last week. He can bat a bit, too, and is a fine athlete.
Gary Ballance is also, we heard, a great back-foot player and he did play well square of the wicket in the 2013-14 Ashes ODI series. On the other hand, few people watching Ballance in his last 10 Test innings (average 13.4) will have nodded gravely to themselves and pronounced, yes, top-class back-foot player right here.
This though, was the theme of the day: fog, obfuscation, awkwardly pitched spin. A few hours later, as England and West Indies set about making a fair go of one of the more incidental, oddly sidelined international matches of any recent English season, it was tempting to look back with a little sympathy on what was a pretty horrendous morning on so many separate but connected levels for the ECB.
Strauss is by now an old hand at the patient, slightly wounded chief executive’s crisis-management tone. But when it comes to Stokes, the Mbargo affair, and an increasing tendency to step outside the lines, he must feel a genuine sting of personal frustration.
“We need to support Ben at this difficult time,” the director of England cricket said. “We can’t really comment until we have all the facts,” he also said, quite often. Well that’s certainly one way to go. Another reading would be that the ECB also needs to ask Stokes what on earth he was doing in a student bar in the wee hours in the middle of an international series, no doubt the oldest father of two in the room.
Who did what is a matter for the police. Whether a professional athlete should be present in the first place is another matter. And yet, this is also something new. For the first time in the modern history of the England team, Strauss must manage a player who is, in effect, more powerful than his overlords, an asset whose value is no longer determined by what the ECB says or does.
Strauss has helped to make Stokes a very wealthy man on the back of being encouraged to play a full IPL season. It worked. Stokes is now out there on his own, IPL player of the year, a trainee universe boss, completed as a player by the experience. At the end of which the Ashes needs Stokes more than he needs the Ashes. The ECB needs Stokes, its prime playing asset, not only to compete but to sell its marquee event.
Should Stokes be prevented from going to Australia, as a less important player already might have been, he can earn more money by playing in the Big Bash instead. Next year’s IPL auction will provide life-altering riches. How do you go about bossing a universe-boss? Stokes may look a little silly, indeed a little troubled after spending a night in the cells. But the ECB also looks different, just a little bit more stretched and outflanked.
But then, to manage the day-to-day business of England cricket for the past five years has been to oversee a much wider process of change. It isn’t Whitaker’s fault he has to announce a team of mix-and-match, might-bes. Other forces are at work on Test match cricket. The urgency lies elsewhere now, in the new white-ball world, at every level from the priorities of a generation of players, to the split county season, to the fact even the England Lions are playing five T20 matches in Australia this winter. All of this is related. Just as the Stokes affair only serves to illuminate the fault lines in a wider story of player power and altered gravity.
