3 minute read
We’re inclined to agree with Brendon McCullum that it’s “quite annoying” there’s currently so much focus on the night Harry Brook got chinned by a bouncer. We would however disagree with his assessment that it’s all about the specific players involved and that, “piling on to them is not helpful for anyone.”
We don’t doubt that there’s hand-wringing in the usual places – hand-wringers gonna wring hands – but who’s piling on exactly? To our eyes, the focus is not on the players, but on McCullum and other higher-ups at the ECB, no?
Because ‘young sportsman has wild night out’ isn’t really much of a story, in all honesty. ‘Young England captain has wild night out on the eve of a game against backdrop of wider concerns the head coach might be running a bit of a loose ship’ has more of a hook.
Those concerns don’t need to be 100% legitimate, but they do need to have at least a faint air of truth about them for the story to stick.
Loose ship
"Small or big - take your pick. It doesn't have to be legit. It's gotta be a loose ship. It's gotta be a loose ship."
For what it’s worth, McCullum takes issue with the perceived looseness of his ship. He says it’s a “misconception”.
We’d agree that while there’s certainly evidence some players have drunk too much a couple of times during his three and a half year tenure, we haven’t exactly been washed away by a tsunami of piss-ups. But that’s the other reason the ‘quite annoying’ focus on the Brook thing persists – because the ECB clearly tried to keep this one quiet. In which case, WHAT ELSE ARE THEY HIDING?
This is perhaps the crux of it. If you’re the one who hid something and it then came out, but you know you aren’t hiding anything else, then constantly being asked “What else are you hiding!?” is probably ‘quite annoying’.
At the same time, from the opposite vantage point – where a thing that was hidden subsequently came to light – it’s perfectly natural to wonder if there might be a second, third and fourth thing you haven’t been told about. It’s then ‘quite annoying’ when the people who tried to conceal Thing 1 get all stroppy and demand that you move on.
Of course none of this clears up what should be done with our drunken sailor above and beyond the £30,000 fine he’s already been given.
Hoo-ray and up she rises!
It has to be said that as drunken sailors go, right now Harry Brook is performing perfectly acceptably. We don’t feel any burning desire to rage against the ECB’s decision to deal with him by inviting him to captain England in a T20 World Cup. What else could they do? Put him in the scuppers with a hosepipe on him? Drag him by the leg in a running bowline? Who even knows what those things mean?
Somehow, despite a perception that England’s red and white ball teams are both starting to fall apart under McCullum, the T20 one has in fact won 10 of its last 11 games.
It’s become quite an interesting team too.
Where the Test XI has tightened to right-arm fast-medium monotony, the short format strategy has become a looser fit. Run your finger down the team’s top wicket-takers of the last 12 months (like a literacy-challenged simpleton) and the bowling types progress as follows:
- Leg-spin
- Slow left-arm
- Left-arm fast-medium
- Slow left-arm
- Left-arm medium
- Off spin
- Right-arm fast
Lovely stuff. A veritable household of misfits; a team that has won after making 304 for 2 and also when defending 128-9.
It’s a fickle format, of course, and cricket’s sole superpower is in prime form and on home turf for the tournament ahead, which begs the question what is England’s strong recent record actually worth?
Maybe not so much – but it’s better than a taste of the bosun’s rope-end, isn’t it?
