JUSTIN LANGER: Ben Stokes is right, cricket does have a drinking culture

Ben Stokes said something this week that plenty inside the game would not have liked to hear.

Speaking on the For the Love of Cricket podcast, he was asked directly whether the current England cricket team had a drinking problem.

Pausing for a second, the recently retired England captain refused to wear that accusation.

“For people who think the English cricket team has a drinking culture, I would say no.”

He said: “That is such an extreme thing to put on a team.”

Instead, he widened the lens.

“I would just say cricket has a culture that is associated with alcohol,” he admitted.

“There’s this relationship with alcohol within cricket that has been the same from the 1980s. As the game has got better and better, drinking is the one thing that has stayed around.”

“I think cricket has a drinking culture and that hasn’t changed,” he said.

The truth is, for better and worse, I agree with him, certainly within Australian, English and South African cricket.

The game has professionalised almost everything else — but the drinking, as Stokes quietly admitted, is the one thing it still hasn’t got around to.

I grew up in the impenetrable aura of cricketing folklore.

Doug Walters with a cigarette in one hand and a beer in the other, playing cards, then walking out and making a hundred between tea and stumps.

Rod Marsh reportedly knocking over 45 cans on a flight to England in 1977, breaking Walters’ record. David Boon going past him with 52 in 1989; a number so famous it has its own place in Australian sporting mythology, right alongside Bradman’s 99.94.

We didn’t hide those stories. We told them. We put these legends on television, on beer cans, in advertisements.

Merv Hughes became a national treasure, mostly for his lion heart on the field, and partly because he looked like a bloke you’d love to meet at the pub.

In a way that was the point. Cricket sold itself as the sport of the everyman, not the athlete who had to sacrifice the amber ale for a game on the grass.

Through my career I have arm-wrestled with the concept of alcohol and cricket. As a player I was always balancing the pursuit of physical, mental and technical excellence with the fun, camaraderie, relaxation and joy of the celebrations.

Now as a coach, working with high-level medicos, strength and conditioning coaches and highly-paid players, the wrestle continues.

When I was coaching WA and the Scorchers our major sponsor was ‘Alcohol Think Again’ which helped us with safer, more responsible drinking environments.

Through all this, I am still torn.

I want to be honest about that, because it would be easy to write this column from a high horse; one that I have no right to be riding.

Some of the best hours of my life were spent in a dressing room after a Test match, sitting on a bench in sweaty whites with a beer in my hand and men I had fought beside.

Singing the team song, Under the Southern Cross I Stand, was one of my favourite parts of playing the game. There is nothing in my professional life I would trade for those nights.

So when Ben Stokes comes out and says, cricket generally has a drinking culture, I am not the one to give a temperance sermon.

We have professionalised almost everything else — the diets, the fielding drills, the analytics, the sleep science, the pay cheques. Basically, everything is measured and analysed today and yet the beer consumption has stayed relatively unchanged.

Compared to the neighbours, we are the strangest professional sport in the world.

Talk to people in Olympic sports, swimming, cycling, rowing, athletics, and drinking is close to taboo in season. Not banned in every case, just unthinkable, as athletes search for milliseconds of advantage.

In other codes, clubs manage alcohol tightly, one for athletic advantage, but also from the historical and reputational pain of players behaving badly or being photographed out on the drink during a poor run of form. These moments create news cycles and are more grief than they are worth.

For some reason, cricket has been slower in adopting the same habits as other professional athletes.

There is no reason for this. Five days of Test cricket is tough work. Six hours in the field, fast bowlers performing one of the most unnatural sporting pursuits, fielders running and diving and batmen having to concentrate for hours on end.

Some scoff when I talk of the high fitness standards of cricketers, but I see what I see, and I know what I know. Ben Stokes himself is as hard working a sportsperson as I have known, even if he does enjoy a beer after a day’s play.

In cricket there are the long tours, hotel rooms in foreign cities and now the revolving doors of franchise cricket, and 20-over cycles finishing late into the night.

There is more downtime in cricket than in almost any professional sport, and downtime is where habits live.

But among it all I don’t think that’s the whole story. I think the real reason is that in cricket, alcohol isn’t just tolerated. It’s ceremonial in many teams. Celebrating success is one of the sure-fire ways of building a strong team.

This is another part of the conundrum.

I get the physiological problems with alcohol as an elite sportsperson, but I also understand the strength in team building through celebrating a win or staying together after a loss.

There is also a level of hypocrisy in this.

When a team is losing, the very first question asked, by media, by boards, by fans, by coaches is about the drinking culture.

What are they doing off the field? Are they too close? Are they too loose? Are they really focussed? My experience in all teams is that every failing team gets an alcohol audit.

When that same team wins, we film them spraying champagne, we broadcast the ‘shoey’, we run the dressing-room footage as the emotional climax of the highlights package.

The photograph of a captain with a beer and a trophy is one of the most reproduced images in our sport.

Same behaviour. Different scoreboard. We have decided that alcohol is a character flaw in defeat and a celebration of the human spirit in victory, and we have never once explained how both can be true.

I’ve spent close to 35 years in change rooms. I know what the beer is doing in there.

For most of the people I have shared those rooms with, it’s not really about the alcohol. It’s about permission, permission to stop performing, to stop being watched, to be an ordinary bloke among ordinary blokes for a couple of hours. It’s a release valve on a life lived under enormous scrutiny.

That need is real and I don’t think you can legislate it away with a curfew or ban. From what I have seen these rarely work. They may on work sites or mining sites when people’s lives can be at stake, but in a sporting team I am not so sure.

Will it change in cricket?

Asked what the fix was, Ben Stokes was honest enough to admit he didn’t have one.

“I honestly don’t know what you do to change it,” he said. “It’s just one of those things.”

When I started playing, tobacco money helped bankroll the game. Benson & Hedges was stitched into the fabric of Australian summer. Plenty of players smoked, openly, and nobody blinked. Today you would struggle to find a professional cricketer who touches a cigarette.

But let’s notice what caused that. Cricket didn’t have a moral awakening. Society did. The science became undeniable, the law changed, the sponsorship was banned, and the game followed along behind. Cricket was a passenger, not the driver.

Alcohol hasn’t yet had that moment. The science on alcohol and athletic performance is also undeniable, it wrecks sleep quality, slows recovery, dehydrates, impairs decision-making the following day. Every strength and conditioning coach in world sport knows it.

And yet the beer has stayed, because the culture around it has stayed.

In countries like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka and even New Zealand, alcohol isn’t a part of their cricket culture because it’s not as much a part of their daily lifestyles.

So maybe alcohol isn’t a cricket culture, but rather a culture in England, Australia and South Africa where drinking is an accepted part of our society; where our changing rooms are a mirror of what is accepted in the broader community.

As we have seen the tobacco went when the world made it go.

Will this happen in cricket, only time will tell. The younger generations are showing signs, but again, this is also being mirrored outside the changing room walls.

Ben Stokes has shined a light this week, only time will tell if it initiates any changes.