\u2018Booze, beach, beaten\u2019: Six-day Poms \u2018stag do\u2019 exposed as axe sharpens for Baz, Ben \u2014 UK View<\/a><\/p>\nBen Duckett pictured in a viral video of him in Noosa, and after being dismissed in the third Test in Adelaide.Source: Getty Images<\/p>\n
Duckett has had a poor series atop the batting order, averaging 16.16 with a best score of 29. At age 31 and with 41 Tests to his credit, he has been a mainstay of the Test team for the past three years under coach Brendon McCullum.<\/p>\n
The left-hander has off-field form in Australia, albeit a long time ago. During the 2017-18 tour, Duckett \u2014 then aged 23 \u2014 poured a drink over the head of teammate James Anderson in Perth and was provisionally suspended by the ECB.<\/p>\n
Key, who did not travel with the team to Noosa, spoke at length about reports around the trip shortly before the Duckett video came to light. He said that excess drinking on an Ashes tour was \u201ccompletely unacceptable\u201d but it was his understanding that the players were \u201cvery well behaved\u201d on the beach getaway.<\/p>\n
ECB responds to drinking culture claims | 01:53<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve actually read what\u2019s happened, or what\u2019s been written in the last day or so,\u201d Key said.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd if it goes into where they\u2019re drinking lots and it\u2019s a stag do, all of that type of stuff, that\u2019s completely unacceptable. I\u2019m not a drinker, I think a drinking culture doesn\u2019t help anyone in any stretch whatsoever. I have no issue with the Noosa trip if it was to get away and just throw your phone away, down tools, go on the beach, all of that stuff.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd we\u2019ve added the security, we\u2019ve got enough ways of finding out exactly what happened and everything that I\u2019ve heard so far is that they sat down, had lunch, had dinner, didn\u2019t go out late, all of that, had the odd drink, I don\u2019t mind that. If it goes past that, then that\u2019s an issue as far as I\u2019m concerned. That\u2019s what we\u2019ll find out.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf there\u2019s things where people are saying that our players went out and drank excessively then of course we\u2019ll be looking into that. I\u2019m not a drinker. Drinking excessive amounts of alcohol for an international cricket team is not something that I\u2019d expect to see at any stage. And it would be a fault not to look into what happened there. But from everything that I\u2019ve heard so far, they actually were pretty well behaved. Very well behaved.\u201d<\/p>\n
England vice-captain Harry Brook.Source: AFP<\/p>\n
Key also confirmed that two players had been given informal warnings about excessive drinking during the white-ball tour of New Zealand that preceded the Ashes. <\/p>\n
Vice-captain Harry Brook and Jacob Bethell, who could play the Boxing Day Test at the expense of Ollie Pope, were warned after a late-night drinking session before an ODI in Wellington.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere wasn\u2019t any formal action,\u201d Key said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s a whole process in place for what you do if they\u2019re out of line. I didn\u2019t feel like that was worthy of formal warnings but it was probably worthy of informal ones. That was a bit of a wake-up call for what they were going into.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) is \u201cestablishing the facts\u201d after a video appearing to show Ashes…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":368962,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[3443,63,689,45898,651,199871,2133,9564,199876,199874,12548,199873,43,174093,199872,160455,44,677,152206,46,199875,701,199877,1124,41,39,42,40,3349,3439],"class_list":["post-368961","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-adelaide","tag-australia","tag-australia-and-new-zealand","tag-batting-order","tag-brisbane","tag-drunken-video","tag-england-cricket","tag-european-central-bank","tag-excess-drinking","tag-fan-calling","tag-fox-cricket","tag-fresh-drama","tag-headlines","tag-international-cricket-team","tag-investigating-behaviour","tag-james-anderson","tag-news","tag-oceania","tag-opening-batter","tag-perth","tag-practice-nets","tag-queensland","tag-series-deficit","tag-south-australia","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories","tag-viral-video","tag-western-australia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/368961","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=368961"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/368961\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/368962"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=368961"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=368961"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=368961"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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