Alex Hales insists a World Cup win on Sunday won’t complete an incredible cricketing redemption for him because it is not why he plays the game.
If any other player had made that claim you would be suspicious, but actually with Hales it seems entirely plausible. How else would he have even got here to a T20 World Cup final if he wasn’t able to park the past and move on with his life?
Regardless of the self-inflicted nature of it, to be axed from the 2019 World Cup squad on the eve of what would be a winning campaign for a recreational drugs ban was a devastating experience. “It eats at you inside, that you should have been part of it and you weren’t,” is how Hales described it.
