Carse was de-arrested within minutes in Derby, and England still took him out of the Lord’s squad

Brydon Carse will not be at Lord’s this week. England removed the fast bowler from their squad for the second Test against Pakistan on Monday, a day after video circulated of him being led away from a bar in Derby by police, and the independent Cricket Regulator has opened an investigation into what happened on Saturday night.

What the police actually said

The force’s account is short, and on its own terms unremarkable. A man in his 30s was arrested on suspicion of being drunk and disorderly in Derby city centre on the night of 22 August, a Derbyshire Constabulary spokesperson said, and was de-arrested shortly afterwards after agreeing to leave the area. No charge. No night in a cell. Carse, who is 31, is understood to be the man involved.

What turned it into an England problem was the footage. The clip that surfaced on Sunday showed him surrounded by officers outside the venue, with his Durham team-mates Ben Stokes and Matthew Potts both visible in it. Neither has been accused of doing anything wrong. Stokes had spent that afternoon taking 5 for 17 to bowl Derbyshire out for 84 and win Durham the County Championship match by 338 runs, in his first red-ball outing since retiring from international cricket. The players were out celebrating.

Carse was only in Derby because England had left him out at Headingley. Released back to his county after missing selection for the first Test, he spent the weekend playing for Durham rather than carrying drinks in a Test dressing room, which is the sort of ordinary arrangement nobody notices until a video appears.

Sonny Baker takes the seat

The ECB referred the incident to the Cricket Regulator on Sunday and confirmed on Monday that the Regulator would investigate. Carse is unavailable for selection while that runs. Hampshire’s Sonny Baker comes into the squad for the match, which starts on Thursday and runs to 31 August.

Baker has one Test cap. He got it in June, against New Zealand at The Oval, in the match Stokes and Gus Atkinson had been stood down from while the ECB looked into a night out of their own. England’s second seamer keeps being decided by things that happen after midnight.

They go in 1-0 up in the three-match series, having beaten Pakistan by an innings and 103 runs at Headingley inside three days. Carse was not in that XI anyway, and has not played international cricket since the Ashes, where he took 22 wickets at 30.31 across the series. Losing him costs England nothing this week on the field. It costs them somewhere else.

The pattern is the story

Just under two weeks ago Joe Root, in his first act since taking the Test captaincy back, scrapped the midnight curfew England had been under since January. He said he did not think curfews worked, and that players who are asked to take responsibility on the field have to feel like grown adults off it. That position is now being tested by the first weekend it survived.

Root inherited a squad that had spent a year producing this exact category of headline. Harry Brook was given a final warning and fined around £30,000 after being struck by a bouncer at a late-night venue in Wellington, hours before he captained England in an ODI on 1 November, then initially lied about being alone to keep his team-mates out of it. In June, Stokes and Atkinson were stood down from a Test while the board investigated a nightclub incident that left a member of England’s security staff needing stitches. Both were later cleared of violent conduct and given written warnings for breaching contractual obligations.

Rob Key, England’s managing director, refused at the time to accept that the Test team were a national embarrassment, and followed up with fresh guidance on alcohol. Stokes has since retired from international cricket. Root has replaced the curfew with trust. A week on, the Regulator has another file open, and the ECB has to decide whether the problem is a set of rules that keeps getting rewritten or a culture that keeps outrunning them.

Carse has been here before

For Carse himself, this is a second collision with cricket’s disciplinary machinery in a little over two years. He served a three-month suspension between 28 May and 28 August 2024, part of a 16-month sanction with 13 months suspended, for placing 303 bets on cricket between 2017 and 2019. None of them were on matches he played in, but English professionals are barred from betting on the sport at all, and the ban took out most of his 2024 summer.

He came back within weeks and made his Test debut in Multan, against the same opponents England face on Thursday, and bowled well enough to become a fixture. Now he is out of a squad again, this time without a charge against his name, waiting on how the Regulator reads a night that Derbyshire Constabulary closed within minutes. A cricketer can be de-arrested by the police and still have a problem with his employer.

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