Ben Stokes has solved it. After years of sports science obsessing over marginal gains—altitude training, biomechanical analysis, sleep optimization—England’s captain has identified the real performance enhancer: a proper drink.
In comments that will surely inspire a thousand think pieces and zero actual policy changes, Stokes insisted that drinking is simply embedded in cricket culture, but that England’s team definitely, absolutely does not have a problem with it. The distinction is crucial. It’s not a problem if you’re winning. It’s character. It’s tradition. It’s the lads being lads.
This is the sports world’s favorite logical pretzel: romanticizing excess as long as the results show up. We’ve spent decades watching athletes succeed despite their vices, then rewriting history to suggest the vices caused the success. Drink made them tougher. The late nights built resilience. The chaos forged brotherhood.
Never mind that every other sport has quietly spent the last decade professionalizing recovery and eliminating unnecessary variables. Cricket, apparently, knows better. The assumption being that a World Cup trophy is waiting somewhere in a pint glass, just waiting to be claimed by whichever team commits hardest to the social calendar.
Stokes is not wrong that drinking is embedded in cricket—it absolutely is. But framing that as a feature rather than a habit worth examining is the kind of thinking that keeps sports stuck in the 1980s. The real question nobody’s asking: how many World Cups has England actually won while defending this particular tradition?