Alex Hales’ journey from drugs ban to key man for England at T20 World Cup

Sam Billings had had his say on the run-out at the non-striker’s end that had brought the women’s one-day international between England and India at Lord’s to an ugly conclusion. “There’s surely not a person who has played the game that thinks this is acceptable? Just not cricket . . .” he tweeted.

Among the many replies, Alex Hales added his tuppence worth: “It shouldn’t be difficult for the non-striker to stay in their crease til the ball has left the hand . . .”

To which Billings replied: “Not like you to be different, Alex.”

There were a couple of laughing emojis to accompany Billings’s tweet and it has to be said that Hales’s stance was hardly outrageous, given that my always fair colleague on these pages, Mike Atherton, is of the same mind, but, of course, there is truth in jest, as well as in wine.

Hales has always been his own man, treading his own path, but taking all manner of wrong turnings in the process and seemingly arriving at a dead end when seeking international redemption after his axing from the England squad in 2019.

Even now, with Hales aged 33 and back in the England squad in Australia for the upcoming T20 World Cup amid assurances of a new maturity, if you speak to Andy Flower, who gave Hales his first international cap in 2011 and has been his coach at Trent Rockets in the Hundred for the past two seasons, he will tell you that Hales still sets himself apart as a character.

“He is one of those players that does like being different,” Flower says. “He does slightly carry himself apart from everyone else. He is quite an individual. But there is nothing wrong with that.”

Indeed there isn’t, and Flower says that he likes Hales and considers him to be “fun”, having not had any problems with him, and having not seen the “bad side to him that others have seen”.

But clearly others have had their problems with that bad side of an enigmatic player who has found himself in rather a lot of hot water over the years.

Hales’s image is poor. As Mick Newell, Nottinghamshire’s director of cricket, who knows him better than most having given him his first professional contract in 2008, concedes: “People’s views of Alex can be quite polarised.”

There is very good reason for that. Many would alter the adjective used by Billings and Flower to “difficult” to describe Hales, an assessment not easily countered when the player has just spent 3 and a half years out of international cricket because of reasons other than his cricketing ability.

Hales’s charge sheet is certainly long. He was involved in the incident outside a Bristol nightclub in September 2017 after which Ben Stokes was charged and later cleared of affray, and in 2019 it was revealed that he had failed a second test for recreational drugs, precipitating his deselection from the England squad. There have been many misdemeanours that have been publicised, like charging into the third umpire’s room during a Test at the Oval in 2016 to dispute a decision, being the subject of tabloid headlines in Barbados in 2019 after which his girlfriend dumped him, and painting his face black for a fancy dress party in 2009, but one insider says that Hales also did “quite a few other daft things” in addition to them. He had been quite the bad boy of cricket, culminating in that decision in 2019 by England.

“There has been a complete breakdown in trust between Alex and the team,” captain Eoin Morgan said about the decision.

Hales had previously been a popular member of the squad. He was happily the butt of many of the jokes, even if some of his colleagues were rather wary of occasional wild off-field antics, mainly born of insecurity. His defence mechanism was to play up to his own description as a “bit of a chav” and be the “Jack the Lad” character that others enjoyed until things went wrong. Coaches were often frustrated by his chaotic lifestyle and an attitude that, while never deliberately malicious, was too easily perceived as selfishness.

One former coach considered him “rude” at times, while another was always irritated by his lack of consideration for those helping him, for example not apologising if he hit one of the coaches throwing at him with a booming drive or leaving the net without thanking the thrower. But the Bristol incident, in which he also initially lied to police in saying he had not witnessed it, changed everything for Hales.

Hales was not charged but he did receive two sentences from the Cricket Discipline Commission for bringing the game into disrepute, one for the fracas itself and another for some lewd photographs that appeared on social media shortly afterwards.

What angered the England squad most was that, on the morning after Stokes’s arrest, Hales did not inform any of them about what had happened and then went off to play golf. Hales’s view was that he was protecting himself and Stokes by doing that, and that he had told Reg Dickason, the team’s security officer. But the fact that in his recently released documentary, Phoenix from the Ashes, Stokes refers to “my friend at the time, Alex” is telling, even if it was refreshing to see the pair chatting and joking as the teams went out for the national anthems for the first of three T20 internationals against Australia on Sunday in Perth. The events and reasons around Hales’s omission in 2019, after it was revealed by a national newspaper that he was serving a 21-day ban for failing that second drugs test, are complicated.

The England & Wales Cricket Board’s policy on recreational drug use is to treat it as a welfare issue, therefore keeping a strong element of confidentiality for the first two failed tests – a county club still do not get to know now when one of their players fails a first test. But it is revealing that the regulations were changed in the aftermath of Hales’s case, with more severe fines for the first and second offences, although the suspension for the second failed test was scrapped. It was that ban in 2019 that did it for Hales, explained as being for “personal reasons”. That sent journalists digging and resulted in the scoop that eventually brought Hales’s omission, when Morgan met with his senior players – Stokes, Jos Buttler, Joe Root, Moeen Ali and Chris Woakes – at a training camp at the Vale of Glamorgan hotel outside Cardiff.

The players were miffed at Hales’s lack of contrition on his arrival at that camp. Hales maintains that he intended to speak to the group on the morning when given notice of the decision by then managing director of cricket, Ashley Giles, and that it had been difficult to do so on the previous day with players arriving at different times and then playing golf. Morgan, though, had clearly had enough. Hales and his management team, the 366 Group, were angry, releasing a statement arguing that, before publication of the story, they had been assured that Hales’s suspension would not affect his World Cup chances, but here was confirmation of Morgan’s power at the time and indeed the increase of player power as a whole in recent times, which in itself is an interesting strand to this story.

Hales has since described the drive home from Cardiff as being the longest of his life, but he did speak to the head coach, Trevor Bayliss, during it. “I rang him as soon as I could and he was in the car driving away from Cardiff,” says Bayliss, who had agreed when Morgan came to him with the decision about Hales. “I had a good conversation with him, and I don’t think there were any hard feelings at the time. I felt at the time that he was the type of player that could get back into the team.”

Few imagined, except possibly Morgan, that it would take as long as it has for Hales to return to international cricket, but, in fairness, Hales has never sought to excuse or downplay his behaviour. “My twenties were full of reckless mistakes off the field that cost me, let down family, let down teammates, let down friends and close relationships I had,” he has said.

He has mainly stayed out of the media, immersing himself in a T20 career around the world. “He set himself to enjoy his cricket whether he did or he didn’t play for England again,” says Peter Moores, who has coached him at Nottinghamshire since 2015, as well as during his brief second stint as England coach just before that. “It was a tough penalty, missing a home World Cup, especially when England go on and win it. That’s a tough cross for him to bear. That will never go away.”

Has he changed? He must have, in my opinion, because if he is as much trouble as some say, then why would so many T20 franchises around the world be so keen to sign him?

“People change a lot, don’t they?” Moores says. “I look at my own life. You’re not the same person you were when you were 20, or 30, or 40. It changes all the time. You take responsibility for what you’ve done, of course you do, but people change and move on. So, you hope people accept you for what you are now and what you give.”

Hales made a decision some time ago to slow his life down, to move out of the centre of Nottingham to a village about 15 minutes away. He has a South African girlfriend, Nina, whom he visits in Cape Town regularly, and when at home he spends time walking his dog and playing golf or tennis.

“He has mellowed a lot in the last 12-18 months,” Newell says. “He’s very polite in the dressing room, he is very polite to the coaching staff and to the senior management. His new girlfriend has been really good for him, as has living out in the countryside. He is happy in his own company out there.”

Selfish is a dirty word in professional sport, but in my experience, most batsmen are – and often need to be – selfish to some degree and that T20 path that Hales chose to take means that he has to be particularly single-minded. He is actually perfectly suited to that lifestyle. “He is a low-maintenance player now,” Moores says. “He’s self-sufficient and he’s now an organised man.”

It appears that any actions that may previously have been seen as arrogance are now saved for the field of play. “He has a bit of a strut and confidence about him that I quite like,” Flower says. “You need a bit of that at international level.”

Hales relies heavily on his agent, James Cross, who is of a similar age, for counsel, working closely together on the plan for worldwide T20 cricket over the past few years. Hales’s contract to play in the inaugural UAE T20 league in January may well be his most lucrative yet. The truth is that Hales can be articulate and engaging, endearing even in a likeable rogue sort of way, “a good bloke who has made some silly mistakes”, as many have told me, with Moores stressing his love of cricket and the overlooked fact that he is a real “student of the game”. “He is an absolute nut bag when it comes to stats,” Newell says. “He’ll know the stats around the world, he’ll know his competitors’ stats.”

Hales’s cricketing ability has never been in question. Despite his long absence, only Morgan and Buttler have scored more T20 international runs for England. In one-day internationals, only Jason Roy has a higher score for England than Hales’s 171 against Pakistan in 2016.

Those T20 teams know they are getting a batsman who can destroy attacks. Long-levered at 6ft 5in, he can pull and cut the quicker bowlers, as well as produce a powerful backfoot punch, and then when the ball is pitched up, he can launch it high and handsome straight down the ground. His playing of spin has improved, noticeably by moving his position around at the crease to create different angles.

Though he played 11 Tests, making 94 against Sri Lanka at Lord’s in 2016, he is certainly more suited to the shorter formats, signing a white-ball contract for Nottinghamshire in 2018, even if Flower intriguingly reckons that his game has suffered slightly from the absence of red-ball cricket, where a rhythm can be found, and technical aspects worked upon.

Hales’s fielding was not at its best in Pakistan, where he dropped a number of catches, but he did take two in Perth on Sunday.

Coaches say he sometimes struggles with concentration rather than anything else. “He usually catches the harder ones when he has less time to think,” one said. Morgan’s resignation as captain allowed Hales to make the brave move of phoning the new managing director, Rob Key. But of probably greater importance was the call the white-ball head coach, Matthew Mott, then made to Bayliss, who coached Hales in the Big Bash last year at Sydney Thunder. Bayliss told Mott that Hales had definitely matured.

“He is certainly a lot more forthcoming with advice to others in the team than previously,” Bayliss said, crucially. That point is echoed by Moores. “If I ask any of our young batters who they like batting with most, they always say Alex Hales,” he says. “Because they feel great. He’s got a good cricket brain. He is always calm at the crease, he is always clear – nothing complicated for a young player – and he backs people.”

And England are now backing him again. As Bayliss says: “Good luck to him. He’s probably got more experience of playing T20 cricket here in Australia than most of the England boys. So, his selection was a bit of a no-brainer.”

Indeed, it was, as evidenced by his 84 off 51 balls on Sunday. Hales is back, different in character, but unchanged in the power of his batting.

– The Times

Originally published as Alex Hales’ journey from drugs ban to key man for England at T20 World Cup