It is probably slightly wrong, impolitic and even a little debauched to get too excited about Monday's announcement of another Ashes squad for another Ashes series as the conjoined north-south cricketing summer embarks almost immediately on its return Ashes leg. There is already a sense of slightly unnatural fecundity about all this, a glimpse of some alternate sporting world where there are no rules, where that austere four-yearly cycle can be tossed aside like an outdated combine harvester, and where we can simply un-clank the belt buckle, slump back in our padded recliners and allow great dripping fist-fulls of pure Ashes cricket to be sluiced directly into our quivering gullets. Oh yes. There is undoubtedly a lot of it about right now.
Yet despite this it is still impossible not to be excited about the announcement of an England Ashes tour party, a piece of grand autumnal theatre that still carries with it distant memories of empire, of unsmiling wiry men made entirely from flannel and deck chair ends, a business of steamships and gout and playing quoits on deck in vast pleated trousers, oiled hair flapping, before disembarking in woollen coats to perform gimlet-eyed handshakes on the quayside for the local newsreels. Until very recently the announcement of an Ashes squad was still an opaque and ritualistic affair, shot through with bizarre selectorial possibility and undercut at all times by the fear that somehow Graham Cowdrey was going to be in it, or Prince Edward, or a forbidding moustached man who seems to know people.
For all the current centrally contracted transparency this tour party is fascinating for other reasons. There is some tactical intrigue in the possibility Ben Stokes, Ravi Bopara or Chris Woakes might be picked to play at No6. Bopara offers a familiarly brittle sense of class with the bat and can fill a dead half-hour with his right-arm medium-whatnots. Woakes seems like the kind of nice well brought up young man who would help pick up your spilt potatoes from the floor of the bus and looks as though he could bat really well as long as you never at any stage seriously expected him to score any runs. But Stokes is still by far the most interesting of the possibles, not just for his muscular, upright batting and menacingly athletic fast-medium bowling, but for what his emergence represents for England teams still to come. I've seen the future. And it's got quite a lot of tattoos.
This is not so much about Stokes as a generational experiment in train. A fine home-reared talent in Durham's championship winning team, Stokes has simultaneously progressed at every stage through the entwined sedimentary foundation of the ECB's development programme. He is, if not the Chosen One – Joe Root, naturally, is the Chosen One – then the first of the ones who will follow the Chosen One, his selection a further staging point in a soviet-scale programme of nurture and control that began with central contracts and has spooled back downwards through the current expertly choreographed substructure.
Root was the first to emerge from this system fully formed: monitored and burnished from boyhood, with every representative innings from the age of 12 recorded in the central vault, and since presented at Test level as the closest yet to a pre-fab sure thing. As those cricketing conspiracy theorists monitoring these events from their tinfoil-lined trailers will no doubt have already noted, he is just a letter away from being Joe Robot.
What are we to make of this? From a spectator's eye view there is a slight sadness in the threat of impending track-suited homogeneity, the sense of an entire sporting world transformed into one big breathable nylon-viscose Good Area. For all their faults England teams have often provided a brilliantly entertaining sense of human variety, from the buccaneering one-offs of the pre-modern age to Jonathan Trott, whose route into the team has been quietly circuitous and who still has about him something agreeably unstyled, appearing at the crease pecking and twitching and fiddling with his neckerchief with the air of a slightly distracted Victorian inventor who can secretly talk to animals.
There will surely be fewer Trotts and a sense generally of an ever-shrinking hinterland in the factory-grade England of the future. Where it was once pretty much impossible to predict who might be in an Ashes squad two years ahead of time there is now surely a laptop somewhere, in among the many laptops – oh, so many laptops – of the ECB laptop infantry with a precise statistical projection of England Ashes Tour personnel for the years 2015-2035. There is a strange kind of pressure here too. Kent's Daniel Bell-Drummond has played at every England age level to date. He's a lovely lad: he came back to his old junior club Catford Wanderers recently and chatted for ages to the current crop of local kids, who absolutely adore him. But if he doesn't play for England within the next two years he may simply have to be recalled by the ECB and pulped for recycling.
Beyond this there is a sense, as in football, that intensively reared players can often lack something in the imponderables of spunk and pep and unplanned invention. Which is perhaps where Stokes becomes interesting again, as a more unbound, explosive kind of talent and a lively character away from cricket. Personally I'm tempted to think it is a fault within the mille-feuille of systemic controls that meant Stokes had to end up being sent home so publicly from Australia in February for excessive late night recreation. Energetic young men have always done that sort of thing and there is an inevitable clash here between the human reality and the requirements of a well-funded and necessarily regimented system.
Retaining a little spike within the player pool and offering a little give margin for the unplanned is another kind of challenge for the overseers of England's digital generation, the first to be so thoroughly logged and sifted and memory-sticked. Personally I hope Stokes is picked for what is, from itineraries to emergent personnel, a thoroughly modern excursion, and perhaps – as part of the programme naturally – given a little extra space to breathe, too.
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Topic: Ben Stokes - a beneficiary of Barney Ronay's eloquence - Ashes man? (Read 994 times)