Jim Lawley

Ben Stokes, until very recently captain of the England cricket team, isn’t playing in the second Test match of the series against New Zealand which starts at The Oval on Wednesday. His misdeed? Breaching the team’s midnight curfew at the Rex Rooms nightclub in Chelsea when celebrating victory in the first game. Stokes’s new nickname should also capture the essence of the man Let others argue about discipline, a captain’s duties, team culture and the stern machinery of something that calls itself ‘the Cricket Regulator’ (no, me neither). What troubles me is something much more fundamental. If English cricket really is serious about standards, then the clean-up has to start where standards have fallen furthest.

The England Cricket Board is appointing a new national selector: the window for applications closes today. If they get a good man in position quickly, it’ll make all the difference: a team’s performance is determined, obviously, by the 11 players on the field so it’s essential to get the right ones out there. Crass errors in selection led to an embarrassingly poor England side being comprehensively outplayed, yet again, in last winter’s Ashes series. Against an Australian side lacking several of its best players, we were 3-0 down – the five-match series already a dead rubber – after barely 11 days of cricket.

England’s cricketers have just lost the final Test match in Sydney. So the five-match series, a dead rubber ever since the Aussies retained the Ashes over a fortnight ago by winning the first three games, has ended 4-1 in Australia’s favour. This drubbing was entirely predictable: we lost the previous series ‘down under’ 5-0, 4-0 and 4-0 and we never learn. Our bowlers may be inexperienced but our feckless batsmen have no such excuse Nevertheless, as Sir Geoffrey Boycott says, ‘There is every chance that the suits at the ECB will… carry on as normal.’ Attempts will be made to explain away and put a positive spin on England’s performance.

England have just won the fourth Test match against Australia by four wickets. In a bizarre, low-scoring game at Melbourne that was completed inside two days they recorded their first Test win in Australia in 15 years. The pitch was freakish; this was the first Test match on Australian soil without an individual half-century for nearly a hundred years. England recorded their first cricket Test win in Australia in 15 years Set to score 175 in conditions which, to put it mildly, made batting extremely difficult, openers Zak Crawley (37 runs off 48 deliveries) and Ben Duckett (an even more quick-fire 34 off just 26) set the tone with aggressive ‘Bazball-style’ batting, scoring at over seven an over. Then Jacob Bethell became one of the game’s top scorers with 40 off 46.

England’s cricketers have lost the Ashes, after being defeated in the third Test match in Adelaide by 82 runs. The Adelaide defeat follows humiliating routs by eight wickets in both Perth and Brisbane, leaving us 3-0 down; after barely 11 days of cricket, the five-match series is now a dead rubber. We lost the previous three Ashes series ‘down under’ 5-0, 4-0 and 4-0. Apparently England’s cricket management learned nothing from those reality checks. The Bazball experiment has just been stress-tested, found wanting, pulverised and buried And to make it all worse, we’d been told that this tour would be different. Regaining the Ashes was to be the culmination of a project that began in June 2022 when Brendon McCullum took over as coach.