Ben Stokes: It's no longer just about entertainment, it's about winning
Ben Stokes has signalled a change in England's Bazball approach to Test cricket, admitting that his team's main purpose is not to entertain but to win matches.
Stokes has led the transformation of England's Test side alongside head coach Brendon McCullum since he was appointed captain three years ago, playing an exciting brand of cricket and previously stating: 'We're in the entertainment business.'
Now, as he prepares to lead his team into a five-match series against India, the 34-year-old has struck a more considered note, admitting that while England's gung-ho approach is effective when they are on top, they need to get better at regaining control when things are not going their way.
'We have had time to talk as a group, identify areas where we know that we are incredibly strong, but also identify areas that we think we need to get better at,' Stokes told the BBC. 'One of those areas was adapting better when we're up against the wall.
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Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
Bet they wished they'd reined it in! Royal Ascot revellers spotted making their way home after a big day on their feet... in the 32.2C heat
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Times
an hour ago
- Times
Lions legend with calves the size of footballs who sold jeans to KGB
There are two spaces, about 450 miles apart, where Maurice Colclough persists. The first is at Stade Chanzy, where Angoulême reveres her former England lock; a small espace in his name where supporters can congregate on match day. The second is at 32 Broad Street in Blaenavon, at Welsh General Store. He never stepped foot in the latter, yet his memory is here. Colclough was, on paper, a great rugby man: a grand-slam champion with England, and a starter in eight consecutive British & Irish Lions Tests in 1980 and 1983. Yet his legacy is almost rugby adjacent, different from the fruits of Willie John McBride, Martin Johnson or Bill Beaumont (Colclough called Billy, his second-row partner, 'head boy'). Mountainous in stature and will, yet his family laugh at how ungainly he could be. Rugby was not his raison d'être, merely the vehicle by which he lived and which gives cause to remember him. Early one Friday, Colclough's wife, Annie, sits at a table at the back of Welsh General Store with her four daughters: Fen, from her first marriage; Morgane; and the twins, Brogane and Freya. It is a riotous morning of storytelling, punctuated by light dabbing of eye, for a husband and father who died in 2006, aged 52. Through chemotherapy and disgusting broccoli smoothies, he survived with a brain tumour for almost four years when six months was expected. The invincible man who could drop a breeze block on his foot and hardly wince, carrying on building a wall, was cut down. Colclough was outsize, a bon viveur. A second row whose calves were described as footballs, so big they would rub together and wear holes in his socks, and who sat on a bench at Freya's parents' evening and broke it. Even if he were on the delicate seating at the back of the shop now, he would not have been telling the stories. Colclough left that to others — and everyone has a yarn about Maurice Colclough. It inspires a question: is the man also the myth?His wanderlust took him to France, where he was Marquis de Colclough, running cruises as Holiday Charente and keeping a bar in Soyaux called Liverpool. Angoumoisins such as Fabrice Landreau, the France hooker who spent time at Bristol and Neath, worshipped Colclough. He remains a prince in those parts. He also played for Swansea and conducted business in South Africa, returning his family to Wales after a car-jacking. 'He directed the hijackers,' Brogane says. 'He was actually really funny. 'Would you like my watch?' ' 'I arrived in this country with a rucksack over my shoulder and £25 in my pocket,' Colclough said in 1982, a rare example of him as narrator. Story time. The legend of Colclough's arrival is that he was kicked off a train, having paid the wrong fare, and hitchhiked with a man who happened to be the coach of Angoulême. Brogane retells this. 'Oh, I didn't know that,' Annie says. This is how two hours in Blaenavon unfold: a torrent of five sources providing collective memories, or individual offerings and details pieced together. Here is a flavour of some greatest Colclough hits. He toured the Soviet Union and sold jeans to the KGB. He performed perorations inspired by Churchill, Kipling and Shakespeare as captain. He swam naked across the Liffey in Dublin to waiting policemen. He locked out a team-mate on a window ledge in Canada. He beat Fen's South African rugby friends in arm-wrestling and so they had to do the family's gardening. He frequented a French all-you-can-eat seafood restaurant with such abandon that they had to change policy. A recent Rugby Journal essay recounted some of the tales. 'A couple of things in there we didn't know,' Freya says. Now for the most famous tale, of which variations exist. Colclough, in a post-match function, downed what appeared to be a bottle of aftershave. Colin Smart, the England prop matching his consumption, did so too, but Colclough, a prankster, had switched his liquid. Smart had not. Cue stomach pump. 'He'd gone in before, he'd tipped it out, he'd put white wine in,' Brogane says. 'What Dad said he thought would happen is he'd basically put it in and then spit it out.' At Brogane's wedding last year, every guest had a bottle of aftershave with limoncello in it. 'I actually think the one where he shot the bullet through the roof is better,' Brogane adds. That was on tour when a policeman came to quell rugby rowdiness and Colclough, thinking the safety was on, aimed at the ceiling. Maurice met Annie at Cardiff Arms Park and settled in south Wales. Both were entrepreneurial. He bought a trawler called the Picton Sea Eagle with plans to turn it into a floating restaurant. When in South Africa, he was involved in slot machines. 'I remember taking him to Cyril Ramaphosa's house,' Fen says. 'For business.' A week before this interview, Ramaphosa was at the White House as president of South Africa. In her father's image, Morgane opened Welsh General Store on St David's Day this year. It used to be a bookshop with 10,000 books — she points to the sagging roof — and, seeking a change from London, she bought it in an online auction. Annie ('the veg deliverer'), Fen and Morgane live nearby. Brogane has travelled from London, Freya from Manchester, to recollect. The quintet hammer home the sense of adventure he instilled. 'Excess is best' was his motto, giving one's all but having fun. 'Life was about risk,' Freya says. When Colclough had a boat that needed to sail from Spain to South Africa, via Brazil, he enlisted a 17-year-old Fen. 'That was my choice, but I would never have made it had he not brought me up,' she says. 'I did sail with him across Biscay, so we did sail on the boat together. He bought a boat off a Russian spy, basically, and it still had all the spy stuff on it.' That included a 'spy pen' that exploded. The travelling companion fainted, and Colclough carried on sailing solo with a damaged finger. Theirs was an active childhood, with rugby as part of it. Twenty years ago the family featured in The Times as Morgane and the twins played sevens for Llandovery College (Maurice was in Vienna, having been told the wrong week). At a memorial match in France after his death, Morgane was asked to begin proceedings. 'It says she did a drop-kick in that article,' Freya says. 'She did not do a drop-kick.' Morgane adds: 'They had to restart the match. It went about two metres.' For Colclough, it was all a game, a fraction of life. The sisters chortle at his love of sports day, once sending a camera crew when he was unavailable, and training the twins for the three-legged race so well that they were almost banned. 'The head teacher was like, 'Sorry girls, you can't compete together in the three-legged race, it's not fair,' ' Brogane says. 'Dad has never gone to see a head teacher before. Ever. He turned up in the school. He must have been in the office for 30 seconds. He came out, he's like, 'It's fine.' ' No one gets in the way of a Colclough and sports day. Such activities were far more important to Colclough than publicity. 'Head boy' Billy was captain on A Question of Sport and until recently chairman of World Rugby. Colclough was a player first and last, and the family agree that he would have known no trivia. 'He didn't have any real interest in celebrity,' Brogane says. Fen adds: 'Other people are more interested in rugby than he is. He would never watch it.' Freya tells another story: 'We went camping and fishing on his motorbike and I was on the back and we turned up at this camping site, just the two of us. We were just signing in and the man that was signing us in was like, 'Oh, Maurice Colclough, there used to be a famous rugby player called Maurice Colclough.' Dad said nothing and I was like, 'That's him!' ' At the start of this interview, Annie had laughed and said: 'Sorry, can I just ask? What is the reason for this?' It was to hear memories not from the Lion's mouth, but from the cubs. 'It's sad, obviously, to think that he died at 52, but I swear to God, that man lived 12 times more in those 52 years than so many other people do,' Brogane says. Now Annie: 'I'm just trying to think what he would have thought. He did philosophy, and he could be quite philosophical. Trying to imagine him, what he'd be doing now, and that's quite painful to think about. But then I don't know if he would actually enjoy being older.' Unanimously, they believe the seriousness of professional rugby would have been anathema to him. Those who recall him are still excited when they find out they are in the company of one of Maurice Colclough's daughters. 'One of our regulars found out and he's just brought in a Lions book today that he had,' Morgane says. 'He put notes where Dad's name was.' Rugby, again, as the gateway to the man. His approach to life continues fivefold through the women on a street in Blaenavon. 'I think about it more and more now — there is so much of Dad in all of us,' Brogane says. 'I feel like I've got that tin-of-beans-on-someone's-head energy.' Oh yes, the beans on the head. Well, that's a story for another time.
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
Marnus Labuschagne axed as Sam Konstas returns for Australia in first West Indies Test
Australia's selectors have made their biggest call in recent memory, dropping Marnus Labuschagne from the top order and replacing him with Sam Konstas. Chief selector George Bailey confirmed on Friday that Labuschagne would miss next week's first Test against the West Indies. Steve Smith will also miss the match as he recovers from his dislocated finger, with medical staff to assess him ahead of the second Test. Josh Inglis will come into the XI, while it is expected Konstas will open, but Australia will unveil their batting order and bowling attack closer to the start of the first Test next Wednesday. It is the decision to drop Labuschagne that will be the biggest talking point since Bailey took over as chief selector in 2021. Labuschagne was the top-ranked Test batter in the world as recently as two years ago, but has averaged just 27.82 for the past 12 months. He was moved from his regular spot at No 3 to open in the World Test Championship final loss to South Africa last week, for returns of 17 and 22. 'Marnus at his best can be a really important member of this team. He understands his output hasn't been at the level we, or he, expects,' Bailey said in a statement. 'We will continue working with him on the areas of his game we feel he needs to rediscover. 'We continue to value his skill and expect him to work through the challenge positively.' Konstas's recall comes after he was left out of the team for Sri Lanka, following the teenager's high-profile start to Test life with a half-century on debut on Boxing Day against India. Selectors opted to go with Travis Head at the top of the order in Galle, given their preference to have him open on spinning wickets. But that move was only ever temporary, leaving the opening spot free for Labuschagne at Lord's last week and now seemingly Konstas in the West Indies. Inglis also impressed with a century on debut in Galle in January, before being squeezed out of the side for the Test Championship final. 'Steve needs more time for the wound to heal so we'll give him another week's rest and assess his functionality after that,' Bailey said. 'We have made the decision to give Josh and Sam the opportunity to replace Steve and Marnus. 'We are excited to see them get the chance to further their fledgling Test careers. In his only opportunity in Test cricket to date, Josh was outstanding in Sri Lanka, showing great intent and ability to put pressure on the opposition.' Sign up to The Spin Subscribe to our cricket newsletter for our writers' thoughts on the biggest stories and a review of the week's action after newsletter promotion The decision to drop the 30-year-old Labuschagne comes after former coach Justin Langer urged officials to keep him in the side this week, with his experience valuable. Usman Khawaja is aged 38 and Smith 36, meaning a transition in the top order looms after David Warner's retirement from Test cricket last year. 'He's actually a very, very important link in this chain,' Langer said on Monday. 'You think about the history of Australian cricket. The best young players come in surrounded by absolute guns. 'Michael Clarke, Ricky Ponting, Damien Martyn and Matthew Hayden. They come in and they're around gun players. If you just all of a sudden bring a couple of kids in, Cameron Green's still young to the game, and you have to bring another kid in there [to replace Labuschagne].'
