England managing director Rob Key has reportedly asked players to refrain from posting about the sport on social media
Type “Mark Wood golf” into Google and the first thing that comes up is the website for a golf instructor from Hampshire, not the England fast bowler who recently complained about media focus on the team’s passion for the sport.
The irony is that Wood, the cricketer, is one of the few players in the squad who does not play golf. Indeed, during rest days on tour, the Durham bowler is often put up for media duties while his teammates are getting in 18 holes.
Yet his comments at the end of last month spoke of a wider annoyance in the camp that chatter about the team’s golf obsession has hit a nerve at the start of a huge year that includes Test series against India and Australia.
“One thing that does bother me is this narrative of ‘golf, golf, golf’,” Wood told the Sky Sports Cricket podcast.
“I don’t play golf. I don’t like it. It’s not a game for me. I know the lads enjoy it and that’s their time off. At times it’s as if the golf is more important, and that is not true at all.
“This narrative of ‘Oh well, we’ll play golf, this is the best gig in the world’, I can understand people’s frustration with it, but I’m telling you, people genuinely care and work hard. That’s what makes me feel uncomfortable, this narrative we don’t care.”
Jos Buttler, Ben Stokes and Joe Root back in 2019 (Photo: Getty)
It was assumed that Wood was responding to comments made by Kevin Pietersen during the white-ball tour of India earlier this year, when the former England captain criticised the team for not training once the one-day series got underway.
“You get paid to win games of cricket,” Pietersen said. “You don’t get paid to play golf. This isn’t a golf tour, this is a cricket tour.”
Pietersen is not the only one who has commented on the team’s liking for golf. Indeed, The i Paper flagged it up during England’s shambolic first-round exit from the 50-over World Cup in India in 2023. It hit a nerve then, too, with Jonny Bairstow biting back at the story during one press interaction in Mumbai.
That inspired The i Paper to base their tournament player ratings on golf. The verdict on Bairstow, rated at three, was “losing his Tour card”. He’s not played an ODI since.
Bairstow infamously suffered a horrendous lower-leg injury on a golf course in September 2022, slipping on a tee box, that ruled him out for eight months.
But England Test captain Ben Stokes also leapt to the defence of the players’ love of golf recently.
Talking on a promotional video for a hotel chain that has 120 golf resorts around the world, he said: “As a team, playing golf the day before a game starts, or two days out, it’s not only a great way to relax. It’s four hours where you’re not thinking about the stresses of playing international cricket.
Joe Root on the Old Course at St Andrews in 2022 (Photo: Getty)
“There’s a few people who take the piss out of us, like, ‘You only get picked if you’ve got a low handicap’ and all that kind of stuff – because we play so much golf. But you’ve just got to understand there’s a bigger reason to why we do all this stuff as a team together. We’re under enough pressure as it is without having to think about it [playing cricket] for longer than we have to.”
Stokes is right. England’s players do deserve to switch off. If that’s by playing golf, fair enough.
Yet the perception that they are more interested in getting their handicaps down than cricket and that some players have been ostracised because they don’t play golf rankles.
Ben Foakes and Jack Leach are two non-golfers who have dropped out of favour in recent years. But to think that was for anything other than cricketing reasons is wrong.
The real reason the golf chat might touch a nerve with England’s players is because they know that it is likely to be a stick that they are beaten with if things go wrong this year, especially on this winter’s Ashes tour.
It’s also why Rob Key, managing director of England men’s cricket, has now reportedly asked the players to stop talking about golf publicly and refrain from posting about it on social media.
As revealed by The i Paper in February, England will not play any tour matches once the series starts. Instead, the players are likely to take some time off during the two long gaps in the itinerary before Christmas, with many playing golf.
That will only become a discussion point if the team are losing.
England found that out the hard way during the 2023 World Cup. It’s a topic that will inevitably come up again if things do go wrong during the Ashes, especially from the Australian media.
It would be best now for Stokes and his players to accept that they have lost control of the narrative and ignore it.
Instead, England should be looking forward to a legacy-defining year in Test cricket without worrying about the outside noise.