Chris Stocks can’t understand the reasoning behind Morgan and Hales’ decision not to tour
The dust has now settled on Eoin Morgan’s decision not to tour Bangladesh and I still feel the same way – England’s one-day captain should have agreed to travel.
Logically, I don’t understand why Morgan – and Alex Hales – refused to go on the trip.
Yes, there was an horrific terrorist attack on a Dhaka café back at the start of July. Foreign Office advice also warns of “heightened” threat of another attack, with Westerners a particular target.
However, the tour was cleared by Reg Dickason, England’s fastidious and highly-respected head of security, and he would not have taken that decision lightly.
England do feel a responsibility to honour the tour. If they had not then Bangladesh would have risked becoming another team forced into exile like Pakistan.
Yet they would not have given the green light to the trip had it not been deemed safe to do so by Dickason. He would have been under no pressure to come to the ‘right’ conclusion. It would solely have been his call and if he felt one iota of doubt about the security side of things he would have advised the ECB to cancel the trip.
He didn’t and on that basis I am happy myself to tour Bangladesh, where I will cover the two Test matches for The Cricket Paper.
Now, I’m not pretending I’m thrilled about it – staying in the team hotel under armed guard, with snipers on the roof and tanks parked outside is not ideal.
But those are the conditions under which the trip has been passed safe and so it is what it is. At the end of the day, covering cricket is my job. If I chose not to tour then I would not only be losing out financially but affording the opportunity for someone else to take my place.
That was my decision and I’ll be honest I never even contemplated not going. Once it had been cleared by the ECB I was happy to commit. So, in my head, I just can’t understand why Morgan – and to a lesser extent Hales – have taken the decision to pass on the tour.
Perhaps I should have thought more about the safety side of the trip. Perhaps I’ll live to regret it if, God forbid, there is a terrorist atrocity in Bangladesh during my time there.
However, in the face of such a threat the best thing to do, within reason, is for life to carry on as normal. Terrorists do what they do to try and change the way we go about our lives.
The best answer to that is to carry on as normal. If not where does it end?
Do you not travel on the tube in London? Should you cancel that holiday to Normandy? How about Florida, New York, Mumbai, Paris, Nice, Brussels, Sydney – all places which have suffered terrorist attacks in the past 15 years.
Now, I’m not saying Morgan and Hales are pandering to terrorists either. That would be preposterous.
Maybe they genuinely fear for their safety, do not feel like they’d be able to do their jobs properly under such conditions and so took the option made available to them by the ECB not to tour Bangladesh. That was their right.
The fact everybody else decided to travel should not matter, although, of course, in reality it will.
For one, places are now up for grabs and if, say, Ben Duckett and Jonny Bairstow or Sam Billings score big runs in the three ODIs or Haseeb Hameed nails down the Test opening slot vacated by Hales then there will be tricky selection decisions to be made in the future.
The ECB, and in particular director of cricket Andrew Strauss, said Morgan and Hales will not be punished solely for opting out of the trip. Strauss, though, did suggest places vacated may not be regained if others perform well. He also said he is “disappointed” with the decision made by both Morgan and Hales. He has previously stated Bangladesh is “100 per cent” safe – patently not true given nowhere in the world these days can be.
The ECB could have avoided all this by not giving players the specific option of skipping the tour. Once Dickason had given it the green light they should have proceeded with it as any other, obviously with the heightened security.
People could have pulled out unilaterally if they felt so strongly.
By giving themselves what seems legal wiggle room in case something does happen they have perhaps created extra doubt where it need not have existed. By giving players the option of not touring, nobody can say they have forced anyone to go on the trip and so they cannot later be accused of coercion.
For Morgan, as an England captain, you do wonder if his authority will be weakened by this. Former England captains in Nasser Hussain, Michael Vaughan and Michael Atherton all believe that may be a consequence of his decision.
Ben Stokes and Jos Buttler, who will stand in for Morgan as one-day captain, have said that will not be the case.
Yet you’d think at least one or two – players and management – might resent their captain for not travelling. If that is so then the ramifications of his decision may be more serious than he anticipated.
This piece originally featured in The Cricket Paper, September 9 2016
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