Another selection crisis on the eve of a major campaign, but would the ECB have acted had the news not broken?
Andrew Miller29-Apr-2019Perhaps, for Alex Hales, this is the bucket of cold water over the head that his career has been begging for for years. Glory should have been there to be grasped this summer, but Hales’ idiocy has seen to it that he’ll be wracked only with regret while his team-mates take centre stage in May, June and July.Leaving aside for a moment the wider implications for England’s World Cup bid, the situation is a personal tragedy for Hales, the circumstances of which will lean ever more heavily into the “duty of care” aspect of the ECB’s policy regarding recreational drugs.If, as has been suggested, Hales has been struggling since the Bristol trial, amid the divulgence of both his unsavoury role in the night’s proceedings, and of details of his personal life that would not have come to light but for that new-found notoriety, then the punitive nature of the ECB’s decision will do little to aid his state of mind.He will therefore need close monitoring and support – from the PCA, from Nottinghamshire, and from the England team from which he has been so summarily drop-kicked – to ensure that the slippery slope, on which his two positive drugs tests already indicate he has stepped, does not become exponentially steeper in the coming weeks.But, as England’s director of cricket Ashley Giles implied in coming to his decision on Hales, such personal issues are – frankly – an irrelevance hereon in. The only things that really matter to the ECB right now – in these final, squeaky-bum moments before four years of hard planning are put to the test – are the “best interests of the team, to ensure they are free from any distractions and able to focus on being successful on the pitch”.Well, in that respect, England were damned if they did and damned if they didn’t – stick with Hales and risk contagion, with the summer’s agenda hijacked by off-field issues, or take the hard line, and plough themselves once again into selection chaos on the eve of their biggest forthcoming campaign.This , after all, is how England World Cup campaigns are meant to pan out – amid rising panic and a fusillade of knee-jerks, whether that be (and this is but a limited sample) the ditching of Nick Knight for Nasser Hussain on the eve of the 1999 tournament, the carpeting of Andrew Flintoff post-pedalo in 2007, or the ditching of Alastair Cook just weeks before the ill-fated 2015 event.It’s another ballsy call from Giles, a man who has cultivated an improbably hard image in his brief tenure as England’s managing director. In his very first press conference at Lord’s, he decided that the team’s love of playing football as a warm-up needed to come under scrutiny – a strange hill to choose to die on, if the overseeing of a contented squad is one of your primary aims. Soon after that, and in far more serious circumstances, he was ordering the last-minute withdrawal of Joe Clarke and Tom Kohler-Cadmore from Lions duty following revelations in the Alex Hepburn rape trial.And it was also Giles who sanctioned the early departure of Paul Farbrace as England assistant coach – a decision that was seen to be “less disruptive” than having him move on to Warwickshire after the Ashes, as originally planned. One wonders whether the England squad might have appreciated Farbrace’s avuncular good cheer in and around the dressing room as the pressure begins to ramp up this summer.Either way, in a season that has been billed as a carnival of cricket, and in which England’s players are being talked up as role models by a board who are desperate to put their sport’s best foot forward in their most significant home campaign of all time, another vital veneer of joy has been sucked from their preparations.That, incidentally, is not a call for the ECB to sanction idiocy, or illegality for that matter. But given that there appear to be protocols in place to tackle the sort of societal issues to which Hales has succumbed, it seems a big call to reach for a punishment beyond the 21-day ban that he is already serving – or indeed to ignore the other measure at their disposal, the four-match suspended ban that still hangs over Hales from the CDC hearing.In a case of curious timing, Hales had been due to link up with England’s World Cup squad for a get-together in Cardiff this past weekend, an event that was sandwiched by the news of his drugs ban breaking on Friday afternoon, and now his sacking from the squad on Monday morning. This makes Giles’ decision seem particularly reactive – the ECB cannot legally sack him, but would they have taken such drastic action had it not been for the story becoming headline news? Surely not. And that begs questions of an entirely different nature.This all has shades of England’s Ashes campaign two winters ago, when Stokes’ removal from that tour, in similarly unilateral circumstances, transformed a long-shot of a tour to a no-hoper.It is not quite the same scenario – Hales is not even in the first XI, after all – but his banishment does appear to be the latest in a series of hairline cracks in the fabric of England’s World Cup squad. There’s no guarantee that they will undermine a structure that, until a fortnight ago, seemed to be the best-prepared England cricket team since the 2010-11 Ashes tourists (another side that recognised the integral value of bench-strength), but the mere knowledge of their existence is a weakness in itself, and one that a plethora of hungry opponents will be eager to exploit.There is, however, one potential up-side to this chaos. After all the squawking in recent weeks from England’s under-pressure seamers, there is now an official vacancy for Jofra Archer in the 15-man World Cup squad, and even if he is not a like-for-like replacement, he is an injection of all-round excellence that England cannot, and surely will not, take for granted anymore.Others will be marching into the spotlight in the coming six ODIs against Ireland and Pakistan – James Vince, fresh from a career-best 190 for Hampshire against Gloucestershire, has been catapulted to the top of the tree, especially now that Sam Billings has been ruled out for the season with a dislocated shoulder.But given that the narrative of the past 12 months has been one of stability and steady progress, Hales’ banishment gives the selectors far more leeway to judge their players on current form rather than past reputation. Their World Cup ambitions are suddenly all up for grabs, for better and undoubtedly for worse.