"Trouble is that without Stokes, England are like a table with a length sawn off a single leg: no matter how you work on the other legs, the table will never be quite stable again. All the drinking bouts and vagrant headbutts in the world won't in the end obscure that."
Monday 4 December 2017 17:33, UK
England may or may not be too partial to a tipple, writes Australian journalist Gideon Haigh, after Jonny Bairstow's headbutt-gate, but one thing's for certain: they are really missing the New Zealand-bound Ben Stokes in the Ashes...
Does England's cricket team have a problematic drinking culture?
Frankly, I haven't a clue and personally, I don't care. But it's a question with which to beckon browsing eyes, and you can count on its widespread consideration in the aftermath of the peculiar affair of the Jonny Bairstow headbutt which rendered farcical the concluding inquests into the first Test.
There is no right way to manage such incidents. The ECB simply found one of a wide variety of wrong ways. First have Bairstow turn up to assure the media that nothing untoward occurred, but not take questions. Second have Trevor Bayliss turn up to reiterate the foregoing, but in the next breath concede that he didn't know what had actually happened.
Third, thanks to the foregoing, leave hapless Joe Root answer several of the same questions, when he might have been accentuating the positive aspects of England's performance. Lastly, having successfully left this impression of confusion, leave it to your plain-speaking, dry-humoured opponents, Cameron Bancroft accompanying Steve Smith, to make a gag out of the whole thing.
Even with this, one's inclination is still to apply Occam's Razor: the simplest explanation is that Bairstow was guilty mainly of an excess joviality. But the ECB could hardly have better clouded the matter had they brought in a supply of dry ice.
The affair of Ben Stokes - now on a plane to New Zealand - remains such a long way from concluded; Bairstow was one of the players sanctioned. You can hardly complain of a loss of proportion when the whole of the tour has been defined by a night of alcohol-induced red mist.
It's tempting to theorise that the two incidents are, in a way, related - that England's players went for a drink precisely because they were anxious not to succumb to post-Stokes puritanism, because they wished to assert business-as-usual normality. Bairstow is partial to pubs, and not only for the obvious reasons.
In his new memoir A Clear Blue Sky, profoundly moving in its retelling of his father's suicide and its expression of his abiding filial love, Bairstow talks about their place in his childhood: "It may seem odd to say this - though it became perfectly normal to me - but my dad and I spent a lot of time together in pubs." He also talks about the strong kinship of Yorkshiremen and Australians: "We're equally tough, equally competitive, equally stubborn and equally willing to talk to whoever is in the same bar as us."
Bairstow may have to qualify these beliefs since learning that the traditional Yorkshire headbutt of greeting appears open to antipodean misinterpretation. Australians are subtler, too, than he gives them credit for. The incident came to light because the hosts made sly references to it before and during the match, as a result of which a flustered Bairstow threw away a crucial second innings. When the Ashes is on, nothing is off limits.
Mind you, the Bairstow affair has not proved without positives. So tenaciously were the media pursuing the anatomical and taxonomic details of the cranial contact, there was relatively little time left to review the totality of Australia's final supremacy: the 10-wicket victory margin belied England's competitiveness at times in the first three days, but was not in the end unfair. Australia won all the game's decisive moments despite England enjoying more than a few variables, such as the fall of the coin, the benignity of the pitch, and the unseasonally mild weather.
A handful of visiting players had useful games. All the prentice batters - Stoneman, Vince, Malan - got starts. Nobody looked out of their depth; some might benefit from the step up in quality of opposition. Trouble is that without Stokes, England are like a table with a length sawn off a single leg: no matter how you work on the other legs, the table will never be quite stable again. All the drinking bouts and vagrant headbutts in the world won't in the end obscure that.
Can England fight back in the second Test, beginning on Saturday? Regrettably, at the very moment the team could probably benefit from a drink, they might be feeling self-conscious about having one. A few had gruelling matches at the Gabba - Chris Woakes, Jake Ball, even Alastair Cook.
They face in Adelaide the vagaries of the pink ball and its pitch's precautionary thatch. At least the game's evening hours will keep them off the streets, as it were. But they could forfeit the Ashes under the lights in a sloppy session. That would cue some reflections more serious than those concerned with alcohol.
Gideon Haigh will be writing for Sky Sports throughout the Ashes series.
