Both Team Stokes and Team ECB have shifted their position during a two-week psychodrama that has left more questions than answers.

Stokes went from acting apologetic in WhatsApp groups with England’s management to threatening to retire when he felt cornered into resigning as captain, a job he said he “f—— loves” in an Instagram post in March this year. Having not even witnessed the Saracens academy player Totoa Auvaa taking a swing at Gus Atkinson, he felt the incident was blown out of all proportion by the ECB. He then dug a trench over the fact he had done nothing wrong because the curfew rules were so opaque. The Harry Brook precedent was in Stokes’s favour, too. Brook had committed a worse offence when he was punched by a bouncer in Wellington hours before he was due to captain England in an ODI but was fined, not suspended, and it was not made public.

The governing body travelled its own journey from fury over its captain breaking the rules he wanted imposed and expecting him to resign over the issue, to recognising those rules were not codified clearly enough. But as far as the ECB is concerned, it would not be in this position had Stokes gone to bed at an appropriate time.

There were also concerns that Stokes was frazzled by the job after four years as captain and a poor Ashes series. Senior figures at the ECB wondered if the pressure was making him act recklessly by going on a long drinking binge. “It’s not just about what’s happened on Sunday night,” Key said in his press conference. Stokes had, after all, been snappy and acted a little out of character before the Lord’s Test started.

Eventually it dawned on England they lacked a mandate to sack Stokes, and that public and pundit support was with the captain to carry on. England also lacked a replacement captain or all-rounder. That was hammered home in the defeat at the Oval, after which two of the three debutants were dropped from the squad.

They had been in a tricky position when it first emerged, because they could not afford for it to come out in the media, and were also fearful of the extent of the incident, especially in an age of camera phones and CCTV.

However, a situation that could have been resolved quickly with a swift investigation, an apology from the players, but with backing for Stokes from Key and McCullum, descended into a long bureaucratic process and a new chapter in the battle between Stokes and the ECB started.

When Michael Vaughan wrote a Telegraph Sport column on Sunday night headlined “Ben Stokes and the ECB can never trust each other again”, it was briefly reposted (then deleted) by Stokes’s account. Neil Fairbrother, Stokes’s agent and confidant, as well as a long-time associate of Vaughan, also reposted the column.

The Stokes-ECB relationship crumbled over the Bristol court case in 2018. After winning England the 2019 World Cup final, Stokes told Lord Patel, an ECB board member who had criticised his conduct in Bristol, to “f— off” when he asked for a selfie, though Patel denied this happened.

It appeared for a while that Key had brokered peace. Wearing Nike trainers and golf gear, Key was not your typical ECB suit. His relationship with Stokes was strong and he became a buffer between the captain and those at the governing body he instinctively distrusts.

The cracks opened in Australia when Stokes was unhappy with McCullum and made that plain in his end-of-tour report. But Key backed McCullum to stay and both were empowered by the ECB to carry on to the end of the next Ashes series. The fragile peace lasted one Test match at Lord’s – which England won – and the subsequent fallout has plunged the relationship to a new low. Stokes was bemused by McCullum questioning his mental health and the face-to-face meeting with Key at Durham last week is believed to have been strained.