Ben Stokes

It has been a bad year for sportsman-door interactions and Stokes got this particular ball rolling in March when his West Indies tour ended with a first-ball duck in his final innings and a furious assault on a locker that left the all-rounder nursing a broken wrist and ruled out of the World Twenty20. “It was a huge error in judgment following a frustrating tour for me,” he said. “It’s obviously something I regret doing and hopefully in the future, if I get to that point again, hopefully I can deal with it in a way where I don’t break a wrist.” Chance would be a fine thing – in his pre-professional days Stokes once broke a bone attacking a fire door, so this was not even a first offence. He has since returned to the England squad but in 11 innings from that day onwards he has averaged 8.40 with the bat in all internationals, with eight of his innings ending for six runs or fewer (and mostly fewer; there are five ducks on that list).

Josh Hodgson

More door-sportsman interaction, though this time the battle had a different winner. Hodgson has not had a terrible sporting year and ends it having swapped Hull KR for Canberra Raiders but it will be remembered for the moment after England went out of the Four Nations, when a night out ended, in the early hours of the morning, with Hodgson launching himself at the flimsy door of a student flat in Dunedin, flying straight through it and leaving a Hodgson-shaped hole behind. All of this, and the celebration that followed it, was videoed and swiftly uploaded to the internet, which enjoyed it very much. “Josh has said that he is embarrassed by what he has done,” sniffed a spokesman, but trips to New Zealand – where a few years ago the union side endured a series of ferry-leaping, dwarf-throwing and indeed sporting humiliations – are swiftly becoming problematic in both codes (and not always for the tourists).

Aaron Cruden

Cruden was in the All Blacks squad preparing to depart on a tour of Argentina in September but, when their flight was delayed from Saturday afternoon to the following morning, a group of players decided to go out for the night. The good news is that – unlike several of the alcohol-fuelled evenings mentioned elsewhere in this list – Cruden’s night at the Zookeeper’s Son, a bar in Auckland, passed without major incident and at its end he went to bed and swiftly fell asleep. The bad news is that he was still asleep when the rest of the squad took off the following morning. Cruden later revealed that he “made a poor decision regarding the limits of my alcohol intake” and that as a result would forever “carry the burden of shame and disappointment”. Fortunately the New Zealand coach, Steve Hansen, is the forgiving sort – “Our team is like a family and, if one of your family members mucks up, you don’t stop loving them” – and Cruden was swiftly welcomed back into the fold.

Jack Wilshere

Wilshere not only forced Sky to apologise (not for the last time, as we will see) by turning an apparently innocuous Arsenal FA Cup trophy parade into an anti-Tottenham swearfest but he was then pictured smoking at least two different smokable goods while lounging in a large Las Vegas hot tub during a post-World Cup luxury break with assorted pals and Joe Hart. There is nothing wrong with a footballer letting off a bit of steam after a long and difficult season but on this occasion it was the Jacuzzi that was letting off steam, while the sportsman exhaled smoke instead. Having been pictured smoking outside a London nightclub last October one would have thought Wilshere might know better, but apparently not. “I made a mistake then and I made a mistake again – people make mistakes,” the midfielder said. “It’s unacceptable. I’ll accept the consequences and move on.”

Andrew Strauss

Wilshere was not the only person this year to force Sky into an embarrassed apology, nor the most memorable. Gerhard Berger popped up before the Austrian Grand Prix and promised to be on his best behaviour, apparently because “you already told me not to use the words shit or fuck”; and there was the fan on transfer deadline day who crept up behind a Sky Sports News reporter, who was gamely attempting to bring the world the latest Everton-related rumours from a Merseyside car park crowded with assorted hoodlums and ne’erdowells – there are easier jobs, probably – before assaulting him with a large purple dildo. But the winner of this particularly unedifying battle has to be Andrew Strauss, who thought Sky had turned the microphones off before Nick Knight asked for his opinion of Kevin Pietersen and declared himself “mortified and profusely sorry” after his explicit response was broadcast worldwide.

Danny Coles

Increasingly British-based footballers confine their misdemeanours to Twitter, which snared high-profile victims from Rio Ferdinand to Mario Balotelli over the course of the year. But the then-Exeter City captain Coles suffered a particularly bad case of microblogging madness, when responding to a bit of badinage from a teenage fan (“I just thought it was a bit of banter”) with a blunt exhortation to “fuck off cunt”. As a result of his shamefully Straussian language Coles was stripped of his captaincy and transfer-listed. “I have deleted my Twitter account and will be making sure that I impress upon the rest of the squad the importance of realising what damage ill-judged remarks on social media can do,” Coles said. Sadly he did not pay much attention himself – a few weeks later he was in trouble again for posting a rude message on Instagram (“I genuinely didn’t think anyone else was going to see it. I’ll watch my language from now on”), and two weeks later he joined Forest Green Rovers on a free transfer.

Kevin Grosskreutz

For all that his summer ended with a World Cup medal round his neck and a large tattoo of the trophy on his left shoulder (no matter that he saw not a single minute of Brazil-based action), it started pretty poorly for Kevin Grosskreutz. First there was the time in early May when he “felt my private sphere violated” by some chanting rival fans while on a night out in Cologne and threw a doner kebab at them (one of them said the chilli sauce hurt his eyes and reported the incident to the police). Then a couple of weeks later, after his Borussia Dortmund side lost the German cup final to Bayern Munich, a team night out ended in the early hours with Grosskreutz urinating in the lobby of a plush Berlin hotel. “I was totally frustrated after the game,” he explained. “I had a blackout, I’m sorry.” (Grosskreutz had fled the scene by the time police arrived, something the Australian rugby star Greg Bird could not manage after a similar incident on the night of his wedding this month but then he did not give himself much of a chance: he had urinated on a police car.)

Vanessa-Mae

If entries in this list were judged purely on sporting performance the violinist would probably deserve a place, having finished a miserable last out of 67 entrants in the Olympic giant slalom. “With my limited experience at my age I’m happy I made it down,” she said, grinning, at the time. But her presence here was guaranteed once news broke that she had qualified for Sochi by (allegedly – the case is now in the hands of lawyers) fixing four qualifying races in Slovenia, by hiring skiers to perform badly in them, including in the results athletes who were not even there, and an assortment of other comedy felonies. “At first we were laughing when we heard about it,” the FIS president, Gian-Franco Kasper, said, after discovering the ruse. “But then we realised it’s quite a serious thing.” The fiddler has found herself with a ban that will rule her out of the next four seasons, leaving her free, perhaps mercifully, to concentrate on the Four Seasons.

Fiddled races? Photograph: Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP/Getty Images

Hydrogen

In 2012 Sheik Fahad al-Thani of Qatar lavished £2.625m on Hydrogen, half-brother of the 2007 Derby winner Authorized and son of the 2001 Derby winner Galileo, making the horse the most expensive yearling sold anywhere in the world in 2012. Nothing much has gone right since, starting with a couple of training injuries in 2013, as a result of which he spent so much time stuck in his box that he got frustrated, kicked a wall and injured himself again. This year, with his trainers still talking up a possible attempt at the Derby, we finally got to see him race. Hydrogen bombed, finishing sixth in a not particularly taxing line-up at Newmarket in May.

Sjinkie Knegt

There is being a sore loser and then there is reacting to a narrow defeat by trying to kick the victor while aiming a series of commonly understood hand gestures in his direction. Stinky Sjinkie took the latter route after Russia’s Viktor Ahn swept past him in the dying stages of the men’s 5,000m relay final in January’s European short track skating championships in Dresden. Knegt accurately deduced that it was “not the smartest thing I’ve ever done”, after the Dutch team were stripped of their silver medals and Knegt of his individual bronze. Even before the incident the fiery Dutchman had earned the nickname Kung Fu Knegt after angrily assaulting a door (another one!) during a domestic tournament. “It was a lot of accumulated frustration coming out,” he explained, promising not to do it again. Karma was to treat Knegt kindly – in the Olympics a few weeks later he was knocked out of the men’s 1,000m in the semi-finals, reinstated on a technicality and promptly hustled his way to Holland’s first ever short-track Olympic medal, a bronze. The man who won that race? A certain Viktor Ahn, this time mercifully unassaulted.