Runs don’t win you a two-innings cricket match, but by Godfrey Evans, they sure as Shivnarine Chanderpaul help. The Surrey v Hampshire County Championship title run-in feels like it’s shed a bit of tension after Ollie Pope’s 136 and Hampshire’s 57 all out in the penultimate round of matches.

We wouldn’t normally report mid-match, but this felt like a significant day.

When Hampshire’s alphabetically unambitious pace trio of Abbas, Abbott and Barker reduced Kent to 32-5 and Surrey fell to 136-5 against Yorkshire, the geographically detached overall head-to-head seemed vibrant and alive.

From this point Kent scrapped to 165 – largely thanks to late developer Ben Compton – before bowling Hampshire out for 57. Surrey, meanwhile, worked their way to 292-6 with papal serenity.

Advantage Surrey, but the one thing you would say is that with Kent already 20-3 in their second innings, wickets are still tumbling at the Rose Bowl. There’s every chance Hampshire will end up with an ostensibly non-ridiculous fourth innings target to chase. And we don’t really know how the Surrey game’s going to go because only one team’s batted on that pitch so far.

But yeah, advantage Surrey.

Speaking of pitches, 26 wickets fell in the best-of-the-rest match between Essex and Lancashire in Chelmsford. Lancs were 7-6 at one point in their second(!) innings. “Days like this are really annoying,” said coach Glen Chapple.

Chief destroyer for Essex has been Zimbabwe-born Netherlands international, Shane Snater, who also happens to be the cousin of Jason Roy, who feels like he’s worth a mention at this point.

Regular readers will remember we did a whole big article about whether Jason Roy maybe needed to play a bit more first-class cricket to get a larger batting workload under his belt. Well Jason Roy may well need first-class cricket, but first-class cricket doesn’t necessarily need Jason Roy. We’re struck that he’s not playing for Surrey this week despite missing out on England’s tour to Pakistan.

Correct us if we’re wrong, but we’re pretty sure his omission from the Surrey team is on the basis of, “Well why would we pick him?” The man isn’t exactly in form and hasn’t played first-class cricket since 2019. He’s not so much beating down the clichéd selectorial door as roaming the streets wondering what building it’s in these days.

However, as a counterpoint to our theory that white ball batters build form on foundations deriving from a certain volume of batting, it’s worth highlighting the man who has effectively replaced Roy in the England T20 side. Alex Hales nearly matched the Hampshire first XI in making 53 on his return to international cricket against Pakistan yesterday.

Hales has thrived while operating as a T20 specialist these last few years. In 2018 he decided to prioritise white ball practice and extra rest over first-class cricket. His last first-class game was in 2017 and he hasn’t even played 50-over cricket since 2019. (Although he probably would have continued with the middle format if it weren’t for the impact of all the street brawls, naked selfies and recreational drugs.)

In contrast to Roy, specialism seems to be working for Hales. A mad disclaimer then: maybe different people need different things at different times.

These two openers are familiar absentees by this point. (Is that possible? Perhaps it makes more sense to say we’re accustomed to their absence.) But it still seems a shame that some of England’s other T20 players have had to move on from the county season before it’s actually finished.

It feels like Pope’s mere presence elevates this early autumn first-class crescendo, but that’s also a reminder that the two title contenders are shorn of Liam Dawson, Sam Curran, Will Jacks and Reece Topley.

Hey-ho, that’s the Championship, we suppose; a sprawling competition where the changing seasons and player availability are challenges as significant as your rivals.

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Eoin Morgan has the air of a man who isn’t going to tolerate any of your shit. You probably didn’t even know you had shit until you saw Morgan’s unsmiling face. Now you realise that you are awash with the stuff.

Morgan isn’t going to tolerate any of it. Not one bit. Not even the really minor inconsequential stuff. When it comes to your shit, Eoin Morgan is saying no. Particularly if you are Alex Hales.

As we correctly deduced yesterday, plenty of England players are completely fed up with Alex Hales and Morgan is definitely one of them.

ESPNCricinfo reports he has said there has been, “a complete breakdown of trust between the team and Alex.”

Without going into specifics, Morgan made it clear that this breakdown of trust came about because of all of Hales’ shit.

“We’ve been working extremely hard over the last 18 months to try and build that team culture and established values that we could adhere to,” he said. He added that, “as a group, culture is extremely important to us.”

Hales apparently “demonstrated a lack of respect” for this culture.

For some reason cricketers talk about ‘culture’ far more often than anyone else in the world. At the same time, they give details about what that culture comprises far less often than anyone else in the world.

This whole Alex Hales affair gives us a few clues though. It could be that the England one-day team considers any or all of the following to be unacceptable behaviour.

• Kicking a bloke in the head when he’s lying on the floor
• Lying to police
• Getting yourself into a position where a naked selfie is being disseminated via social media
• Cheating on your girlfriend
• Taking recreational drugs when you’re supposed to be all serious about the World Cup

Eoin Morgan is the kind of guy who’d look at you in disgust for making a self-deprecating joke. Eoin Morgan is the kind of man who’d be pissed off at you for stacking his dishwasher because you’d have done it wrong.

We’d be highly surprised if Eoin Morgan’s personal threshold didn’t mean that he considered all of Alex Hales’ recent behaviour to be shit that he was unwilling to tolerate.

We’ve all worked with someone who does their job perfectly well but you’re all hoping they’ll go and work somewhere else. There’s always something going on with this person and no-one’s got the energy for it any more because honestly, work’s bad enough as it is right now. You’d be better off with that work experience lad from last summer. Yeah, sure, he was almost illiterate, but he kept his head down and he always got the teas and coffees right and he didn’t bring all of this… this… shit with him.

It’s not so much that Alex Hales’ team-mates wanted him out of the World Cup squad. It’s more that when they were asked what they thought about the situation, they discovered a bottomless well of apathy from which they could draw.

Lawrence Booth reports that Hales failed to apologise during a training camp in Cardiff last weekend, and didn’t seem to have taken full responsibility for his actions either.

We’re paraphrasing here, but Trevor Bayliss can no longer be arsed with him. Bayliss would probably have acquiesced had Eoin Morgan expressed a strong desire to retain Hales and Morgan might have listened had the players made some sort of a case for his retention. It doesn’t seem like either of those things happened, so Hales isn’t playing for England this summer.

We used to write a weekly, and later fortnightly, Twitter round-up for ESPNCricinfo. All those hours of trawling through players’ feeds left us with very firm impressions about a few people. One of those people was Alex Hales. We internally categorised him as a ‘Banter Dick’.

Everyone has experience of a Banter Dick. They like to have a dig at people and they say they’re just having a laugh, but for some reason every joke is at someone else’s expense and they don’t massively enjoy it when the laughs are at theirs. They’re not necessarily bad people. They’re just hard work.

People use social media differently and you can be certain that this was a keyhole-narrow view of Hales. All the same, that perception of a fragile man with a bit of a thin skin has never really been swept from our mind. His Test career could be seen as Exhibit A.

On balance, we suspect that Alex Hales is probably a bit of an idiot. However, we still feel a lot of sympathy for him right now.

A quick recap

This week, Ali Martin reported that the “personal reasons” which had been keeping Hales off the field in recent times could more accurately be termed “a drug ban”.

It was the second time Hales had tested positive for recreational drugs, so ECB guidelines said he’d serve a short ban and get a bit of help and advice and support.

It’s arguably not really that big a thing when taken in isolation, but it followed his part in the Ben Stokes’ Bristol fisticuffs thing and also a bout of decidedly subpar relationship behaviour in the West Indies that was reported in the tabloids.

What’s interesting is that now that the drugs ban is public knowledge, the ECB has looked at all of the above and gone, “No, get out. Go away. No World Cup for you.”

Why have they decided this and where does this leave Hales?

The ECB’s decision

Hales’ management company has pointed out that until the matter became public, the ECB had followed its own guidelines (a 21-day ban). A little later, when it became common knowledge that Hales was serving a drugs ban, they gave him the hoof.

The drug use doesn’t seem to be the problem. People knowing about it seems to be the problem. Why is that?

It’s tempting to see the change of mind as a “brand management” thing; an attempt to keep Team England looking all pristine and wholesome. But then Hales had already kicked a guy in the head while pissed-up on a night out and they were happy to keep him around after that, so it doesn’t feel like that’s the full story.

Most likely they simply don’t want this hanging over the team. They don’t want any of the other players answering questions about it or dealing with tabloids keeping extra close tabs on them all.

Whether excising Hales also excises the story is very much up for debate though. Genies are rarely inclined to return to the bottle. If nothing else, the ECB will now have to answer questions about why they overruled their own policies. This might not seem a colossal issue right now, but wait until Jason Roy’s back goes.

And what about Hales himself?

Hales has clearly not helped himself a huge amount, but let’s set that aside a minute and try and consider where he’s ended up. Let’s think through the life that he’s built for himself and try and work out how it all hangs together and how whisking the World Cup away from him might feel.

Sportsmen are pretty single-minded. It can take a certain level of monomania to even reach the elite level and from then on a lack of balance in your life can sometimes be rewarded. If you practise when others don’t, maybe it’ll gain you an edge.

Hales has gone further than most. Last year he pared his career back to one specific aspect with the home World Cup the motivation and overwhelming focus for that decision.

His personal life is reportedly a bit, um, up in the air of late and a logical response to that might be to place even more emphasis on his narrow professional life. “A few things not exactly going to plan at the minute, but at least I’ve got this,” kind of thing.

The “this” in that reasoning is the home World Cup; the logical endpoint of a whole life that’s been devoted to playing cricket.

(Amateur psychology klaxon, but who’s to say that the looming significance of that tournament hadn’t become so overwhelmingly, crushingly important to Hales that he started looking for escapes in other parts of his life? Maybe that explains some of the shonky decisions. Who knows?)

Imagine being in Alex Hales’ position. Imagine building your life around being good at cricket, and then further refining that to just one-day cricket. Then, on the eve of the biggest one-day cricket thing of your life, imagine being told, “Actually, you’re going to sit this one out.”

However you arrived at that position (and let’s be honest, some of your own actions will most likely add a load of guilt to the mix) that’s got to be hard to deal with. It doesn’t really matter that your hopes and dreams are, in the grand scheme of things, utterly trivial. If this is what you’ve devoted your life to then this is what your emotional wellbeing hangs from.

And someone just unhooked it.

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Not least because he isn’t currently a Test cricketer. But that’s not really our point.

Imagine you have three important things to do today, but you’re kind of pressed for time. If you’re anything like us, you’ll favour the ingenious solution of doing a really half-arsed job on all three. Other people are different. Some might decide to do two things reasonably well and totally sack off the third.

This is Alex Hales’ view. He could spend half the summer driving around the UK to play four-day matches in front of very few people, but it would mean less time to practise one-day batting and also less rest. It is, in short, not his top priority.

Playing in the County Championship might even be a distraction. The more watchful approach and different footwork employed in first-class cricket might actually hamper his short format game.

So why bother playing it? Because he might get another shot at Test cricket? You’re pitting might-play-Test-cricket against almost-certainly-will-play-World-Cup there.

Alex Hales is not turning his back on first-class cricket because it is not about first-class cricket. First-class cricket is collateral damage. Alex Hales is actively focusing on the shorter formats. He is being professional.

More on this topic in our post about Adil Rashid’s identical decision last week.

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The facts are these. Splice and dice them as you see fit.

• The ECB say that 26-year-old Ben Stokes was arrested in the early hours of Monday morning  following “an incident” in Bristol
• Police say a 26-year-old man was arrested that night on suspicion of causing actual bodily harm
• Another fella went to hospital with facial injuries
• Stokes has injured his hand
• Stokes was released under investigation
• Alex Hales is helping police with their enquiries

Our reading of this is that England’s premier one-day opening batsman is pursuing a new career in law enforcement with Avon and Somerset Constabulary. There may also have been a thing with Ben Stokes, but it’s almost impossible to deduce what might have happened with that from these scant details.

But let’s imagine for a minute that Stokes was shit-faced and lamped a fella. You know, hypothetically speaking.

Like all England players Ben Stokes knows not to cross the line. That is something that is inculcated in all who wear the three lions – accurate location of and respect for the line. At the same time, he’s a passionate sort of human being and he wears his heart on his sleeve. You wouldn’t want him to lose that passion now, would you? Where would that leave him?

‘Not under investigation for causing actual bodily harm’ you might answer. Well, maybe, but he needs that edge, doesn’t he? Needs it. That’s what makes him great, right?

In the unlikely event that the above reading of events should prove to be correct, then based on this and previous “incidents” we have another conclusion to put forward.

It is this: Ben Stokes is a bit of a lightweight and entirely incapable of handling his drink.

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One is English, one is Pakistani. One is young, one is old – or at least he is in cricketing terms. For much of last summer’s Test series between England and Pakistan, Alex Hales and Younus Khan trod a similar path. Come the last Test, their journeys diverged markedly.

Hales was relatively new to Test cricket and still struggling to make an impact. Arriving at The Oval, his scores in the series read 6, 16, 10, 24, 17, 54 for an average of 21.16.

Younus was coming to the end of his career. His scores were 33, 25, 1, 28, 31, 4 for an average of 20.33.

Different situations but similar pressure. Both faced the prospect of losing their places in their respective teams.

What happened next feels significant.

Hales’ tale

Hales’ fourth Test scores – 6 and 12 – do not tell the story. In the first innings, he hit the ball in the air towards Yasir Shah – a man seemingly possessed of those precious fielding utensils, the safe pair of hands.

It was a contentious catch. Yasir said he took it. After being given out, Hales said plenty of things himself.

Nor did it end there. Hales continued to express himself to the full during an uninvited visit to the third umpire and then delivered a ‘boo hoo hoo’ mime to Azhar Ali when Pakistan were batting.

What can we glean from Hales’ Portrait of the Artist as a Petulant Young Man? The main thing all of his actions have in common is that they are targeted at other people. He appeared to blame Yasir for claiming the catch, the umpire for making the wrong decision and Azhar Ali for playing for the wrong team. Seemingly unable to control his own batting, he embarked on a futile quest to influence the world around him.

Younus calm

Contrast this with Younus. In the words of Mohammad Azharuddin – the man whose advice ultimately rescued him – Younus was batting “like a joker” during this series. That’s an unusually accurate use of the word, because the batsman was indeed a laughing stock.

As he jumped around the crease, people flitted between labelling his performances as either comical or sad.

Younus was on the way out and he was on the way out leaving an inadvertent trail of excrement. However, while Hales seems uncertain of his place in the world, Younus is not. Younus wasn’t going to let a trivial little thing like everyone else in the entire world thinking he’d had it put him off. He knew it didn’t look it, but he reckoned he was only  a whisker away from playing as well as he normally does. And so it proved.

“Stay in your crease,” said Azharuddin. “Wait for the ball to come to you.”

“Okay,” said Younus. “I’ll give that a try.”

After a couple of overs, things felt better. “Yup, seems to be working,” he said. “Guess I’ll crack on and make a double hundred now.”

What is this reslience; this imperviousness to the views of the outside world? Is it a deep reservoir of confidence borne of years of success or is it innate? Which comes first? Do you earn the right to have that trust in yourself or is it the very thing that allows you to be so effective in the first place?

Perhaps it’s both. Batting is a fragile profession. On these fine margins the difference can lie.

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Yesterday Alastair Cook played far and away the most entertaining reverse sweeps and ramp shots we’ve ever seen. Proof, if it were needed, that context is everything. With 10,000 runs of back story, this was a proper plot twist.

In contrast, Alex Hales’ daddy fifties are a new story. This series the opener has made scores of 86, 83 and 94 and when he was dismissed for the third of those, he really did look like he was fighting back tears.

In coming years, it will be intriguing to see whether Hales or Joe Root has the most expressive hugely-disappointed-at-being-dismissed demeanour. Hales did good facial work, but Root’s hanging head and bat-dragging probably gives him the edge at this stage.

Root has had longer to find his feet at international level though. As Hales becomes more accustomed to the deeper emotions that come with a Test dismissal, we can surely expect to see more full body work. The bat over the shoulder, shielding his face from cameras was perhaps a taste of what’s to come.

It’s tough to work on these things under the harsh and unremitting glare of the Test spotlight, but the best players always find a way.

2 minute readNot so long ago, England were claiming that they had little regard for par scores any more. Henceforth, their only target was to be ‘as many as we can get’. Maybe this is still the case, but today’s batting against the West Indies seemed initially cautious to these sometimes blurry eyes.

We had in mind a rather worrying interview with Jason Roy we read last week, in which he said: “I’ve got to realise I need to give myself time – I’m not a robot.”

It seemed unfair on robots that they shouldn’t be permitted time, but that wasn’t what really concerned us. We were more worried about Roy spending any time at all playing himself in. Jason Roy may well need to give himself time, but that is almost exactly what England don’t need.

Roy’s job is to flail from the off, because Alex Hales can’t. If Roy eats up a dozen balls making a similar number of runs, that isn’t really good enough. It’s a fifth of the innings wasted, because Hales will more often than not be doing the same. Hales has earned the right do that. That’s his way. He is the big log England are looking to ignite. In this analogy, Jason Roy is basically just tinder.

That may seem dismissive, but the truth is that this is essentially England’s strategy. They have ten batsmen, only two or three of whom are special. The rest are disposable; fast-burning kindling. A to-hell-with-the-consequences approach at the top of the order is barely even a gamble because the only consequences are to the individual – the team can easily cope with his loss.

In contrast, Chris Gayle is the West Indies’ Hales. And then some.

Gayle is Alex Hales having played hundreds more international matches and twice as much T20. He is an Alex Hales who’s faced every T20 situation and played T20 in every ground. He is an Alex Hales shot-through with experience and shorn of doubt.

Gayle knew that 183 could be chased in Mumbai. All he had to do was go out and do it.

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If you were starring in Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and needed to act in a scene where the submarine grounded on the seabed or was attacked by some sort of leviathan, there was only one way to do it. You and the rest of the cast ran back and forth across the set as if you were being thrown about inside the vessel.

You ran to the left. And then you ran to the right. Those old school special effects. Were surprisingly entertaining.

England’s 50-over batsmen seem similarly scornful of the middle ground. A year ago, they feared failure and sank, paralysed. Now they seem to have pushed off and run over to the other side of the set.

The whole playing-positively-with-little-regard-for-the-consequences approach is certainly better than what preceded it, but they do at times appear to have rebounded too far. Cheerleaders for positivity they may be, but believing it to be the answer to everything in all scenarios is nought but delusion.

The players may well tell themselves that they’d sooner be all out for 200 shooting for 400 than making 260 only to discover that isn’t enough – but it isn’t that simple. Sometimes 260 is enough and you know it’s enough and you could have got there if you hadn’t been quite so monomaniacal about playing with no fear of failure.

Tempering positivity doesn’t equate to abandoning it. Of course fear of failure is counterproductive, but a healthy aversion to it needn’t be.

Alex Hales appears to be one player who is increasingly immersing himself in the waters of flexibility. The strike-rate may have sunk a little, but the run count has soared.

As far as Hales’ team-mates are concerned, the moral of the story is that the Gavaskar-Afridi spectrum has a broad middle and a couple of small steps in Jonathan Trott’s direction isn’t necessarily a crime.