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Fuming Eoin Morgan reveals senior players sealed Hales’ England removal


Eoin Morgan accused Alex Hales of showing a “complete disregard” for England’s team culture amid a withering assessment of the opening batsman over his 21-day ban for recreational drug use.

The England captain was speaking for the first time since Hales was unceremoniously thrown out of the World Cup squad at the start of the week and insisted he had been unaware of the transgression until it was revealed by the Guardian last Friday.

At a press conference before Friday’s one-off ODI against Ireland in Malahide – a match in which the much-hyped fast bowler Jofra Archer will be handed a debut as he seeks to make England’s final World Cup squad on 23 May – Morgan was visibly angered by the events that prompted him to stand down his much-feared reserve batsman.

“We’ve worked extremely hard on our culture in the last 18 months since the Bristol incident,” said Morgan, in reference to the street fight in September 2017 for which Hales and Ben Stokes were hit with two charges apiece of bringing the game into disrepute but the latter found not guilty of affray by a jury last summer.

“It really did open our eyes to ourselves, not just being judged as performers but how we are as role models. We have been working on it to try and find values that everybody across all three formats can adhere to and those values have been in place the past six months.

“Unfortunately Alex’s actions have shown complete disregard for those values. This has created a lack of trust between Alex and the team.”

Morgan revealed he was among a number of concerned team-mates who contacted Hales when he was first withdrawn from Nottinghamshire’s Royal London Cup games for what were called “personal reasons” and was assured by the batsman that he was in fact OK.

But upon learning the true reasons for his break from cricket was a 21-day ban for a second recreational drugs violation, Morgan called a meeting of senior players – Jos Buttler, Joe Root, Stokes, Moeen Ali and Chris Woakes – at the team’s training camp in Cardiff last weekend to decide the way forward.

Morgan said: “We all agreed the best decision for the team was for Alex to be deselected. I relayed this to [director of England cricket] Ashley Giles, because we don’t have final say, I can only give the view in the changing room and how guys feel.

“We will need at least 15 men to win that World Cup. Whatever way Alex would have dealt with it, the other 14 people would have been dragged down and that would have been quite a weight taken forward. That outweighed his performance. We felt this was the best decision simply because he did not adhere to everything that we have been working towards for a very long time.”

Morgan, who claimed to be “happy” with the decision, declined to consider what he called the “hypothetical” scenario of the truth not emerging and the team heading into this summer’s all-important World Cup with Hales still part of the squad. He accepted, however, that the senior figures at the England and Wales Cricket Board who knew of the ban – Giles and chief executive Tom Harrison – were unable to inform him sooner as they were bound by confidentiality clauses in the policy.

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