England have hit back at claims by Alex Hales that his axing from the World Cup squad because of a drugs violation was a betrayal.
As the saga entered its fifth day, and with the tournament only a month away, dressing-room sources presented a very different picture from the one depicted by his management company, arguing that the decision to jettison him had the full backing of team-mates fed up with his behaviour and desperate to move on from the controversy.
It was also claimed Hales had failed to apologise to them during a training camp in Cardiff over the weekend, and had yet to take full responsibility for his actions – an attitude that helped persuade managing director Ashley Giles, head coach Trevor Bayliss and captain Eoin Morgan to cast him adrift.
England have hit back at claims by Alex Hales that his World Cup squad axing was a betrayal
In a devastating comment on Hales’s behaviour, it emerged that Bayliss felt he could no longer trust him, after generating a rapsheet that includes lying to police on the night of Ben Stokes’s arrest in Bristol in September 2017, unwelcome headlines about his private life earlier this year, and now drugs.
The risk of another adverse story breaking on the eve of the tournament, which begins with England against South Africa at The Oval on May 30, is not one Bayliss was willing to take – despite Hales’s claim in a statement on Monday that he had been assured his World Cup place would not be threatened by his suspension.
Yet there is embarrassment among ECB bosses that they have in effect been hampered by their own protocol relating to players’ use of recreational substances, which insists on confidentiality even after a second failed test.
For legal reasons, only the most senior officials – including chief executive Tom Harrison – were made aware of Hales’s situation, which left Bayliss in the absurd situation of learning about it through the media.
It is equally uncomfortable for the board that Hales would almost certainly still be part of the World Cup set-up had a newspaper not broken the news of his two failed drugs tests.
