Here is a line to keep in mind as we consider the whos, whats, whys and whens of the Alex Hales case. It is from Nathan Leamon’s recent novel The Test, which was inspired by his experiences working as the England team’s performance analyst. One of his characters is talking about the toilets in the England and Wales Cricket Board’s headquarters, where “on the back of the cubicle door someone had written, ‘500 people work for the ECB. At this exact moment in time you are the only one of them who knows exactly what he is doing.’”
Let us take a look at the timeline of how this story has played out. On 17 April England announced that Hales was part of their World Cup squad. On 19 April his club, Nottinghamshire, revealed that he was going to miss their one-day game against Lancashire for what they described as “personal reasons”. On 26 April Ali Martin revealed here in the Guardian that the “personal reasons” were that Hales had failed a drugs test and been banned from playing for 21 days. And then on 29 April the ECB announced that Hales was being dropped.
Hales’ ban was supposed to be over in time for him to be available to play in England’s ODI against Ireland on 3 May, which, counting backwards, means he had already failed the test before that squad announcement on 17 April. The ECB’s own regulations state that because Hales has a central contract and this was his second offence, both the chief executive, Tom Harrison, and the director of cricket, Ashley Giles, would have been notified in writing about Hales’ positive test at the same time as he was.
Hales’ representatives say they were given assurances that the ban would not in itself affect his chances of being selected, that he had been promised the picks would be made on merit.
The question, then, is what changed? This being the ECB, there are no clear answers but then there are not too many options, either.
One possibility is that once one, two or all of England’s captain, Eoin Morgan, head coach, Trevor Bayliss, and national selector, Ed Smith, found out about Hales’ ban, they decided he had to be dropped from the squad because they thought it would be too disruptive to have him around. In which case one could be forgiven for wondering why this crucial bit of information did not reach them, given that the ECB’s confidentiality agreement allowed it to be shared on a “need to know” basis.
Another is that the ECB really did believe it could fob everyone off with that polite euphemism “personal reasons” but that, now it has all come out, they have been so thrown by the gusts of opinion that blew up over the weekend that they have reversed a course they had already settled on.
Maybe there is a third. Maybe both these things are true and the ECB has been driven by some combination of the two. Either way it is an opaque and ambiguous bit of decision-making – a failure of leadership.
Giles explained it away by saying that “we have worked hard to create the right environment around the England team and need to consider what is in the best interests of the team, to ensure they are free from any distractions and able to focus on being successful on the pitch”.
Again, then, the question is why they picked Hales in the first place, but anyway, picking over this mess one gets a sense of just how much pressure the ECB is under right now, a month out from what Harrison calls the “once-in-a-generation opportunity” of the World Cup.
The ECB has been building towards this tournament for four years. It has overhauled its central contract system, rearranged its domestic and international schedules and stuck with a coach who has a mediocre record in Test cricket because it believes he is the man who can help them win it. The ECB is depending on the World Cup to give a badly needed boost to cricket’s falling participation figures and flagging levels of public interest, and to help launch the sport into 2020 when it will start the new competition, The Hundred, on which it has spent nearly all of its emergency cash reserves and much of whatever goodwill it had left.
The ECB has bet more than it can afford on England winning. And in the circumstances of course England want their first-reserve batsman, Hales, a man who has made six ODI centuries and recently held their record ODI score, to be part of the squad. This is the same board, after all, who recently rewrote its own residency qualification regulations just so it could try to fast-track Jofra Archer into the team before the tournament started, even though it is pretty clear that a lot of the players England have depended on these last four years are a little uncomfortable about it. It is as though the ECB has piled such a burden of expectation on this World Cup that everything is beginning to wobble under the load.
The best hope now is that, in the middle of it all, Morgan will be able to provide the England team with the kind of leadership Giles and Harrison have singularly failed to give English cricket.