Monday 4 December 2017 17:41, UK
Ben Stokes will be mortified that he has let his mates down in missing two ODIs and, perhaps, the Ashes tour, says Mike Selvey...
In the end, when due process has been undergone, the truth behind the unsavoury fracas outside Bristol's Mbargo nightclub in the early hours of Monday morning will emerge.
What we do know for certain is that one of the group with whom Ben Stokes allegedly had an altercation ended up in the Bristol Royal Infirmary being treated for facial injuries, while an X-ray was to reveal that Stokes had cracked a bone in his hand. Stokes had been arrested on suspicion of causing actual bodily harm but released without charge pending further investigation.
The ramifications of it all remain serious though, with the disruption to England's Ashes preparations the least of the concerns. Whatever the police investigations reveal about the alleged incident will have a marked impact not just on Stokes' career as a stellar cricketer but his life.
Of course, at this stage, no charges have been made, and besides which there is a presumption of innocence. But a conviction for assault occasioning actual bodily harm, a step up from common assault, can carry anything from community service to a custodial sentence. He is to be re-interviewed by the Avon and Somerset police.
Even were the legal slate to be wiped clean though, there is the matter of the disciplinary proceedings that will be brought against him by his employers, the England and Wales Cricket Board, under the players' code of conduct, an integral part of the central contract which Stokes will have signed.
Stokes has already apologised for his behaviour but that is the start of the process and ECB will await police findings before their own procedures progress in the form of the Cricket Discipline Commission, chaired by Tim O'Gorman, but in the interim, neither he nor Alex Hales, who was with him, will be considered for England selection. So as it stands, no Ashes for him.
Comparisons have already been drawn between this incident and that four years ago in Birmingham's Walkabout Bar when the Australian batsman David Warner took a swing at Joe Root, and was considered sufficiently in breach of the Australian team ethic that he was suspended and subsequently banished to an Australian A tour of Zimbabwe.
Here though the similarity ends, for Warner did not even connect with his attempted punch. If the video evidence of the Stokes incident is to be believed, not only did he land a blow that knocked one person to the ground, but the whole thing was a general brawl in which a flurry of punches were thrown.
If Stokes is deemed culpable of breaching the disciplinary code, then it is hard to see how he can at the very least retain his vice-captaincy position, and beyond that, even go on the tour of Australia.
But we also need to look at the reasons behind what has happened, starting with a team culture and then with Stokes himself. During an interview he gave on Sky to Nasser Hussain, the England coach Trevor Bayliss was asked whether he thought it appropriate that his players were out at 2.30 in the morning in the middle of a series, and he said not.
Both Bayliss and the ECB director of England cricket Andrew Strauss have hitherto expressed a desire to treat players "as adults", but the underlying message seemed now to be that this freedom has been pushed to the limits for a while.
For Stokes himself, this now becomes a real challenge. On the one hand, we accept and indeed applaud, a wonderful cricketer whose inherent aggressive and often confrontational style of play can galvanise his team.
He has had disciplinary issues in the past, when he was sent home from a Lions tour for late drinking sessions, and suffered his infamous broken hand in the Caribbean when punching a dressing room locker in frustration.
No one, though, would seek to curb his playing instinct because it makes him what he is.
There are even signs that he had started to control that dressing room anger, perhaps as a result of anger management therapy, with a strategy that involves meticulously packing and repacking his case until the red mist subsides.
As a consummate team player, Stokes will be mortified now that he has let his mates down in missing two ODIs and, perhaps, the Ashes tour.
This trouble has arisen away from the environment of the dressing room though. Here it needs to be pointed out that those who deal with Stokes have always found him to be polite, affable, helpful and good company.
He is the father of two young children and within a couple of months of getting married. He is also very wealthy now, as a result of his £1.7m IPL contract, with the prospect in the future, as a result of the new TV billions for that tournament, of that looking like "buttons" as one senior ICC executive has described it to me.
Yet for all this, he has not essentially changed, which is both good and bad. If he remains unaffected, the same down-to-earth no-frills character that he has always been, then his circumstances undoubtedly have, for with his fame and fortune needs to come a recognition that he can no longer can he put himself in a position where he becomes vulnerable to the sort of abuse and attention that stardom attracts.
And that brings us to the question of alcohol on which this incident is surely at least in part contingent.
Stokes likes a drink. "We are grown men," he said in a portentous piece in the Times magazine this week (headlined "I'd never get close to punching someone", although that does refer to on the field) when asked whether he drinks during a Test, "we go out for dinner, have a few pints. I'm 26, not 14."
His celebratory drink of choice though is the Jager bomb, a caffeine-heavy, sugar-laden concoction of Jagermeister liqueur and Red Bull, the latter of which happens to be one of his principal sponsors.
The Bristol escapade was a celebratory night out after a win against West Indies that day. Jager bombs are not in themselves inherently alcoholic but in excess (and he claims that one night he lost count after 20) they must have a massive stimulant effect. It cannot be healthy.
Maybe he could learn from David Warner. "Perhaps I let the alcohol and my aggression take over," Warner has said of the Walkabout incident.
In hindsight, he credits that drunken swing at Root as the moment he turned his life around and sent his career soaring. Warner is teetotal now and a batsman bordering on genius. And it is a rare circumstance where someone, even if provoked, cannot simply walk away from trouble whatever the provocation. For Stokes, as it was with Botham and Flintoff, and indeed Warner, discretion has to be the way forward.
