Bedtimegate: How can England have the fresh start they need when distrust flows from the top?

4 minute read

Come on, this has gone on long enough now. Can we just have a fresh start? Trust is important, but so is trusting. Maybe it’s time for England to heed the sage words of Rayden in the Mortal Kombat film: “If you are afraid to trust, you will lose.”

But that’s not where we are. That’s not where we are at all. Post Ashes, England are in a world where enough’s been done wrong that being seen to do the right thing has taken on disproportionate importance – even when trying to look like you’re doing the right thing in fact only makes matters worse. 

“The players now have to show the public they can be trusted,” said Rob Key last week. 

This was approximately two sentences after wondering whether he should add an alcohol ban to the mandatory bedtime that is already in place. “Do we need to look at ‘have we been strict enough?’” he mused.

You know what kind of person always strikes as particularly trustworthy? Someone who’s subject to enforced restrictions on otherwise ordinary activity, that’s who. 

Those kinds of measures aren’t in any way a beacon, drawing attention to issues with really quite basic stuff; they’re actually a great reassurance that these people are extra reliable, aren’t they? To give an example – what proportion of serious road traffic collisions involve drivers who’ve already been banned from driving? Probably not even half.

Similarly, when a grown adult man has a curfew imposed on him, it’s almost a badge of respectability, isn’t it? “I’m 35 years old and my boss says I have to be home by midnight – you can trust me.”

Whose idea was it to impose a curfew anyway? Presumably not Ben Stokes, who went along with it for the first two days of a Test match that barely stretched to three. 

It doesn’t sound like Brendon McCullum was really hammering it home either, despite his vague, borderline unintelligible protestations.

“Some will say, ‘Did everyone know about the curfew?’” he said on Monday, according to Cricinfo. “I think most of you guys know about the curfew and I’ve spoken at length about it. We constantly refer to it in the dressing-room. In my south Dunedin way, I reference it in a slightly more informal manner, but it is referenced constantly.”

We would love to know the informal south Dunedin way of referencing a mandatory curfew. We would like to know the exact wording.

What we have here is a silly bedtime rule for daft young men, enforced by pillocks. The upshot so far has been two suspensions and – because one of those players was the captain and all-rounder – ripples that are so much greater and more destructive. 

To give just three examples:

What’s impressive here is how many people continue to suffer significant personal and professional consequences because of honestly not very much at all really.

If you take out Harry Brook getting lamped by a nightclub bouncer a few months ago, what has anyone actually done? A bunch of them drank beer in Australia and didn’t bother anyone. Stokes and Gus Atkinson went to a place where a rugby player acted like a bell-end.

All in all, this is the dumbest handling of a non-issue and every effort that’s been made to address it has only created three new ways for the situation to spiral further out of control. The ECB should hire Dr Ian Malcolm to explain what’s happening to them. 

They need a fresh start. But how could you have a fresh start? How can anyone heed the words of Rayden and trust who they need to trust against this backdrop? 

After the Ashes, the chief executive of the ECB, Richard Gould, trusted the managing director of England men’s cricket, Rob Key, to put things right. Key then trusted McCullum to deliver this, and McCullum trusted Stokes. Together, they all concluded that renewed trust would require tighter restrictions on the players; an approach that is – as we’ve already laid out – the absolute antithesis of trust.

So now we have a situation where dumb, counterproductive rules are being both enforced and broken by people who don’t believe in them and the only solution – binning them off entirely and acting like grown ups – is the only thing these people can’t do because the same dumb rules have become symbolic penance for a load of mostly unrelated failings.

It’s the kind of situation where you’d want a coach like Brendon McCullum to breeze in, preaching joy and liberty and personal responsibility, and just generally clearing the decks of all this crap. As most of us know, it’s quite hard to have a fresh start from yourself though.