Joe Clarke played a game that trivialised rape: England cricket should demand better

The rules of “Stat Chat” were simple enough. The game would begin the night after Joe Clarke returned from England Lions duty in the United Arab Emirates. “Got to be freshies,” Alex Hepburn wrote in their shared WhatsApp group, meaning women they had not slept with before. “Names, age, black or white, your rating, their rating.”

“No reheats allowed,” Clarke confirmed, meaning women they had slept with before.

“Always me dragging the birds back, you raping them,” Hepburn complained.

“Just bring a mattress,” Clarke wrote later. “So if we do chop, it will have to be in your bed. Probably will chop … so we’ll have to just both chop in your bed like the good old days!”

There is more: some of it graphic, some of it grotesque. But you get the idea. Seeing as Clarke himself described this conversation as “lighthearted chat” during the rape trial of his friend Hepburn in early 2019, we can assume he won’t mind us reproducing it here. And the reason for doing so is that with Clarke on the fringes of playing for England, there are still plenty out there who insist he was guilty of nothing but a little harmless matey banter.

Let’s not demean ourselves by debating Clarke’s merits as a cricketer as if they matter. All you need to know is that the Nottinghamshire batter was placed on the standby list for England’s recent tour of the West Indies, had a stellar winter with Melbourne Stars in the Big Bash and was snapped up for a top-price £125,000 by Welsh Fire in the Hundred draft this year. Had it not been for the events leading up to the night of 31 March 2017, he would almost certainly have played for England already.

Clarke was never charged with any crime. Hepburn, his Worcestershire teammate, was sentenced to five years in prison