England coach Trevor Bayliss has revealed his players have drawn up their own code of conduct for the Ashes tour, following Ben Stokes’s late night bust-up.
The squad arrived in Australia on Sunday without Stokes, who remains suspended by the ECB while he is the subject of an ongoing police investigation over the fracas outside a Bristol nightclub during the one-day series against West Indies in September.
The incident brought England’s dressing-room culture and player conduct into sharp focus and raised the prospect of team curfews being imposed during the tour — something Bayliss said would be considered at the end of the summer.
However, the Australian prefers his players to take responsibility for their own actions rather than impose curfews on them. That is why before their departure for Australia, captain Joe Root and the rest of the squad got together with Andrew Strauss, England’s director of cricket, to draw up a set of guidelines for off-field behaviour.
The result is every player has agreed to inform team security of when and where they are going out and there has been an agreement that drinking alcohol will be banned leading up to matches.
Bayliss said: “I think they’re just sensible rulings, what we should have been sticking to anyway as a player or someone around a professional set-up.
“Not drinking in between matches is just sensible. The players have sat down and had a chat and they’re the ones who’ve come up with it. We don’t want to put too many curfews that keep them in their rooms because it is a long tour.
“It’s about picking the right time to have a couple of drinks.”
England have been reluctant to write off Stokes’s chances of playing in the Ashes publicly but privately admit he is all-but certain to miss the tour, especially because he faces an internal ECB disciplinary probe when the criminal investigation is concluded.
That could prove a lengthy process and the absence of a man who is not only England’s Test vice-captain but also the team’s most influential on-field presence would hand a decisive advantage to Australia.
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Yet Bayliss, speaking today in Perth, remains confident England can get the better of Steve Smith’s hosts when the series starts in Brisbane on November 23.
“You lose a player of Ben’s calibre, and it will make a bit of a difference,” said the Australian. “So, we’re going to have to work out a different combination for the first Test and we’ve got three tour games to sort that out.“I’m quite confident we can come up with a team that’s more than capable of winning. Quite simply, we’re preparing to win.”
