South African cricket fans (and KG Rabada) have had their fair share of run-ins with Ben Stokes, and anyone who watched him plunder a double ton at Newlands a few years back won’t forget that innings in a hurry.

The English all-rounder is a mighty fine cricketer, but it appears he can’t really handle his liquor.

No word on whether he was smashing the double brandy and cokes in Bristol over the weekend, but whatever he was knocking back clearly put him in an aggressive frame of mind.

Here’s Sport24:

Avon and Somerset police said on Tuesday they had been called to an incident in the Clifton district of Bristol at around 02:35 am (03:35 SA time) on Monday…

The Test vice-captain was included in England’s 16-man Ashes squad led by skipper Joe Root announced earlier on Wednesday, despite injuring his hand in the incident that led to his arrest in Bristol on suspicion of causing actual bodily harm.

The 26-year-old was released without charge on Monday, but remains under investigation.

Ignore the headline of the video below because Stokes has certainly not been banned from cricket for life. Given how important he is to the England cause, at worst he might have the vice-captaincy taken away from him.

Right, pay attention to the big hitter below:

Who knows who started it all, but when you’re an international sportsman you need to do better than street brawls in the wee hours of the morning.

Here’s my favourite bit of it all – on Saturday, just days before the brawl, The Times in England published an interview with Ben Stokes. How about the tagline?

The Hit Man – he’s fast and furious.

It gets better – here’s what was inside that interview:

I’d never get close to punching someone – you couldn’t make this stuff up.

More reactions from the England team:

England coach Trevor Bayliss replied “definitely not” when asked by Sky Sports on Wednesday if he was happy with players staying out until the early hours during a series.

“The other night a few guys being out was very unprofessional in the middle of a series,” the Australian added.

Both Bayliss and Strauss are wary of curfews, with the ex-England skipper saying they believed in “treating people like adults”.

But Strauss conceded Stokes’s incident could lead to a re-think, a point emphasised by England limited-overs captain Eoin Morgan after Wednesday’s win.

“We’ll have to put something in place that doesn’t leave us in the position we are at the moment,” said Morgan.

All that hard work by Shaun Pollock to raise the profile of gingers in the cricket community, and here comes Ben Stokes to undo it all…

[source:sport24]