Cricket World Cup: The ECB's botched treatment of Alex Hales won't be forgiven quickly if it costs England their best ever chance of glory

In genuinely trying to do the right thing by Hales, the ECB have contorted themselves into a blunder of farcical proportions

Alex Hales is unhappy with how England have treated him (Getty)

As they say in politics, it’s never the original act that gets you, but the cover-up. And the England and Wales Cricket Board’s shambolic handling of the Alex Hales affair is again symptomatic of a confused and conflicted organisation, infected by a culture of secrecy and a simple disdain for the cricketing public, and in which principle has long been supplanted by public relations and an obsession with process.

Hales has been withdrawn from England duty after it emerged that he had failed a second test for recreational drugs. The operative word there is “emerged”. The Nottinghamshire batsman was already serving a 21-day suspension that the ECB had attempted to spin as a short break for “personal reasons”. He was selected in England’s preliminary World Cup squad , and with the tournament barely a month away, would have been virtually guaranteed a place in the final 15.

The irony is that in their muddling and meddling, the ECB may ultimately have stumbled upon a just outcome. To fail a second drugs test in the run-up to a major international tournament, having already been sanctioned for his role in the Ben Stokes brawl, raises lethal questions over Hales’s maturity and commitment to the team. His suspension is believed to have been broadly welcomed within the England dressing room, and whatever your own views on the use of recreational drugs, there is surely a case for suspending Hales on the grounds of stupidity alone.

None of this exonerates the ECB, however, who in genuinely trying to do the right thing by Hales have contorted themselves into a blunder of farcical proportions. There are sound and legitimate reasons for not publicly disclosing the failure of a recreational drugs test. These relate, most pertinently, to safeguarding and player welfare. Allowing players to get the help they need out of the spotlight is a humane and enlightened policy, one negotiated with the input of the Professional Cricketers’ Association.

Yet it appears the public have not been only ones deceived here.

Alex Hales played a key role in England’s recent limited-overs success (Reuters)

Serious questions now need to be asked of chief executive Tom Harrison and team director Ashley Giles, who were notified of Hales’s second failed test more than two weeks ago, yet who allowed captain Eoin Morgan, coach Trevor Bayliss and national selector Ed Smith to pick Hales for the World Cup squad entirely oblivious to his situation. Hales himself also claims to have been given assurances that any suspension would not affect his chances of World Cup selection. “The fact that all those assurances seem to have been rendered meaningless has understandably left Alex devastated,” Hales’s representatives said in a statement.

In short, then: the ECB hid Hales’s situation from the most important people in the England setup, hid it from the public, ostensibly on the grounds of protecting his welfare, and then when the story became public anyway, threw him under the bus. It takes some ineptitude to botch a situation that comprehensively, and yet from what we already know about the governing body, perhaps we should scarcely have been surprised.

This is the same governing body, after all, who decided to ban Ben Stokes from playing in the last Ashes before any charges had been brought, only to lift the ban as soon as charges were pressed. The same body whose approach to the most seismic change domestic cricket has seen in many of our lifetimes - the new competition that eventually became The Hundred - was to rush the whole thing through in a flurry of misinformation, financial inducements and non-disclosure agreements.

As the custodians of a sport that belongs to all of us, the ECB has a huge problem with transparency. But it goes further than that. The fact that it thinks nothing of misleading the England captain and the England coach - and of hoodwinking one of their own players - betrays an organisation that has spent so long casually deviating from the truth that they no longer seem even to recognise it. And if this latest botched PR job ends up costing England their best ever chance of winning the World Cup, its architects won’t be forgiven in a hurry.