Ashes 2017/18: 1st Test, Day 5 - The Mischief-Makers Threaten to De-Rail England

 

Ashes 2017/18: 1^st Test, Day 5

The Mischief-Makers Threaten to De-Rail England

November 27^th 2017

First, the good news: England duly lost by 10 wickets before Lunch. OK, not so good, but compared to what follows, it seems wonderful. Enough about this until tomorrow. It is not the end of the world, nor are England in free fall. For Saturday’s day-night Test, which even the Australians believe that England could easily win, the one change is likely to be Craig Overton for Jake Ball, unless Moeen Ali’s injured spinning finger obliges a second change.

Now the bad news: no one is talking about this story.

And the worse news: what they are talking about is another dubious “England players are drunken thugs story”.

By a strange coincidence, exactly on the day that Australia went 1-0 in the series, what was apparently a minor piece of horseplay between Jonny Bairstow and Cameron Bancroft several weeks ago, has suddenly and mysteriously emerged in the Australian press as a brutal assault. An incident so “severe” that no one from the always hostile Australian press corps, never slow to publish negative news about England, even knew about it.

Bairstow is mortified. The England management are mortified, not to mention furious with Jonny Bairstow’s stupidity. The Australian team were, by all accounts, enjoying themselves hugely sledging him over the incident and the Australian press have another stick to beat the England team with.

Combine this with a Test defeat and the impression is of a side and a tour that are disintegrating. The danger is that it could.

Okay. So we expect mischief from the Australian media. All is fair in love and war. There was a massive over-reaction to what was essentially a non-story, but destructive mischief from the British press too?

For several weeks there has been a growing sensation that there is also something very disquieting too about the reporting of the Ben Stokes affair. And it seems that I am not the only one who feels that there is something missing from the reporting at all levels and that the press has quite not played clean.

Consider what we now know about the incident. An England player witnessed a brutal homophobic attack and, instead of standing by and watching two young men receive a severe and possibly even fatal beating, stepped in to protect them. Instead of standing aside, as it appears that some of the critics would have preferred and leaving them to be victims of a violent crime, he was brave enough to intervene.

If the press had been interested, the headline would have been:

“Hero England Star Saves Two Men From Brutal Beating”

In which case, the England management would have taken him aside and said something like “Ben, you were daft to get involved and in public we are going to have to say so, but we are really quite proud of you for doing it”. It is also quite likely that rather than a police investigation for assault, there would have been a quiet caution and a warning to leave matters to the police next time. Unfortunately, given the reporting of events, the police have had no option but to send a report to the Director of Public Prosecutions and management no choice but to eliminate Ben Stokes from their plans the short and medium term. The fact that no charge has been brought, even two months later, suggests that there is no clear evidence of a crime having been committed… at least by the person being accused in the media.

Of course, if Ben Stokes had stood to one side and had been a witness to a serious crime without intervening, the newspaper headline would almost certainly have been something on the lines of:

“England Star Watches Passively Horrific Attack”

When the press is out to get you, they are out to get you and, like Ian Botham before him, Ben Stokes’s name sells newspapers, particularly when there is some muck to spread.

When we should be proud of our star player’s courage – if somewhat horrified that he was stupid enough to be out drinking that late and around a violent incident in the first place – we are depriving the England side of his services and subjecting him to a parallel trial in the media, instead of bigging him up. Stokes showed the willingness to stand up to aggression that could have converted a England “close, but no cigar” performance in Brisbane, into a hard-fought win.

You may be disappointed that Ben Stokes was in the wrong place at the wrong time. You will most certainly decide that he committed more than one serious error of judgement. You can rightly suggest that maybe he released one or two unnecessary punches at the end, when the thugs who were the real criminals had been stopped in their tracks. And certainly no one should condone committing criminal violence, whatever the motive, but certainly all the evidence suggests that he has got a raw deal in the reporting of the incident.

As a proud Bristolian, albeit one who would never have been seen dead around that bar at that time of night (although I am reliably informed that I was born not far away from the scene of the incident – admittedly, decades before the bar even existed), I am increasingly glad that Ben Stokes had the courage to do what he felt was right, even if he was a bit of an idiot, knowing that he had previous, to get himself into a situation where he could turn into a “have-a-go-hero”, as the press would term it when they approve of a citizen’s actions in similar circumstances.