Stokes saga humiliated McCullum and exposed England’s captaincy succession crisis | Mark Ramprakash

With Stokes now 35, the ECB needs to identify rising talents with the capacity to be serious people, not just young men having fun with their mates

If we learned one thing at the Oval last week, it is that this England team really needs Ben Stokes. So it came as a relief when, a couple of hours after the second Test against New Zealand ended in heavy defeat, he and Gus Atkinson were exonerated by the England and Wales Cricket Board after an investigation into their celebrations following victory in the first. But the governing body found themselves in a process with no perfect outcome, and if the one they’ve ended up with is not the disaster they flirted with a week ago when Stokes was apparently considering retirement, it is still embarrassing.

Their handling of the incident was understandable, given the public drunkenness that marked the players’ trip to Noosa during the Ashes, and Harry Brook’s altercation with a nightclub bouncer in Wellington before that. There was a real lack of transparency around Brook’s incident, which was not revealed to the public until a newspaper discovered and reported it, and that led to a kneejerk reaction when the ECB thought there had been a repeat. All three incidents could have been handled better – they just keep finding different ways of getting it wrong. At least no one can accuse them of not taking this one seriously, and if it hasn’t truly established their competence it has established that all players are accountable, which will help to set a standard of acceptable behaviour.

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