2 minute read
Ove the last 24 hours, we’ve been steering our exasperation towards amusement through the simple tactic of mentally rewriting all references to England curfews so that they’re instead about bedtimes. The two things are much the same, after all. Doing this swap is funny and it also helps highlight how really very silly all of this has got.
Silly or not though, there’s plenty of talk this monumental temporal crime could be the end of Ben Stokes, the England cricketer.
Just look at the headlines:
- Test captain considering his future after bedtime incident
- Stokes England captaincy on line after bedtime breach
- Stokes to hold crisis talks after staying up past his bedtime
Some would say a great England cricketer deserves a better end than this, but we would counter that it would be hard to manufacture an exit even half as striking and unexpected as Stokes’s career has been. Maybe this is fitting. Maybe it’s an opportunity he needs to grasp.
From getting hit in the dick and immediately confirming, “Oof, right in the dick!” over the stump mic to playing one of the most preposterously bipolar innings of all time, Ben Stokes has always been a spectacularly zany cricketer. We cannot really envision a zanier finish than being pushed out of the game because he stayed up past his bedtime on his birthday.
History has changed. If you google “Ben Stokes nightclub incident,” you now see an entirely different Ben Stokes nightclub incident than the one that’s been at the top of the results page for the last nine years. If you’re catching up on the details, this new one – which we’ll call Ben Stokes Nightclub Incident 2.0 – also features Gus Atkinson and a Saracens rugby player.
Follow on… (That means ‘continue reading’)