Cricketers Have Beer, Shock: well, who knew! This wretched incident in some joint in Chelsea involving Ben Stokes and Gus Atkinson in a dust-up with some extremely large young Saracens rugby players is hardly world war three, but its ramifications are sending shudders through the cricket establishment. At the time of writing the full details are not entirely clear, though it seems that an England Cricket Board (ECB) security guard might have been accidentally thumped before a full-blown ruckus ensued.
Nothing good ever happens after midnight – a sentiment readers will doubtless be familiar with
Whether a well-known and widely admired 35-year-old international sportsman should have been out in a nightclub in the early hours of Monday morning is for others to judge. Stokes isn’t a kid any more. Quite why he hadn’t just headed back to his hotel after celebrating his team thrashing the Kiwis is a mystery. Though as everyone knows, you can’t get a taxi in London at night for love nor money.
Certainly nothing good ever happens after midnight, as both Stokes and the England manager Brendon McCullum have recently observed, and it’s a sentiment that many readers of this journal will doubtless be only too familiar with themselves. English cricket had even imposed a curfew for players following the boozy shenanigans during the catastrophic Ashes tour over the winter, and at the very least Stokes and Atkinson have breached that. Does that mean Stokes should be stripped of the -captaincy? I hope not, but we’ll see. There shouldn’t really need to be a curfew: these players are adults not teenagers, contrary to appearances sometimes.
