The jury in the trial of Ben Stokes has been asked to consider whether injuries allegedly caused by the cricketer during a fracas in Bristol could have been caused by his international teammate Alex Hales.

In his closing speech, Stokes’s counsel, Gordon Cole QC, questioned whether the Durham and England all-rounder was being treated differently because of his high profile. He asked the jury at Bristol crown court: “Is this man being focused on because of who he is?”

Stokes, 27, is charged with affray in the Clifton triangle area of the city during the early hours of 25 September last year. He is on trial with Ryan Ali, 28, who Stokes is alleged to have knocked unconscious in a fight near the Mbargo nightclub that resulted in Ali sustaining a fractured eye socket. Both Stokes and Ali deny affray.

Asking the jury to examine CCTV footage, Cole turned to the alleged role of Hales on the night. Hales was not arrested or charged.



“You will see Mr Hales on one occasion appearing to kick. So when the prosecution seeks to hang all the blame at Ben Stokes’s door by saying he rendered people unconscious, just look at what happened,” Cole told the jury.

“Think about kicks and stamps. There is no evidence before you and I am not suggesting for one minute that you should guess, but you can infer from what you know of the injuries that were sustained. Sustained perhaps by Alex Hales’ intervention? Blows, kicks and or stamps to the head area. Does it follow that all these injuries are properly attributed to Ben Stokes?

“We say no. We say that the evidence is ambiguous. We say how do you resolve that?”

Stokes has claimed he acted in self-defence after Ali threatened to use a bottle. He told the jury he intervened after Ali and his friend Ryan Hale launched a homophobic attack on a gay couple, with Ali allegedly striking one of the men on the shoulder with a bottle and then trying to strike Hales.

Cole said it was up to the prosecution to prove Stokes had not acted in self-defence, and there were gaps in the evidence the prosecution had not sought to explain, which he said should cause the jury to be “massively concerned”. He said Stokes’s evidence had been consistent throughout from the moment of his arrest.

Nicholas Corsellis, prosecuting, told the jury in his closing speech that Stokes’s actions on that night “demonstrates Mr Stokes in a world, and in a way, that is distant from the admirable career that he has. He acted deplorably as the red mist came down and struck with such force it rendered a person unconscious”.

He had left Mbargo in “a rage” after he and Hales were refused re-entry, Corsellis said. The doorman’s evidence was that Stokes offered £60, then £300, to get into to the club and, when refused, abused him about his gold front teeth and “shit tattoos”. The doorman had no reason to lie, the prosecutor said.

Stokes’s version of events was implausible, he said. He said Stokes “wanted to be gratuitously offensive” and his remarks were “designed to provoke, inflame and incite”.



Stokes’s case was that he was acting in self-defence because Ali was armed with a bottle. But, Corsellis told the court, Stokes quickly became the aggressor.

“Even if Stokes at the beginning used self-defence, he very, very quickly moved on and became the aggressor. He pursued the men across the road, repeatedly punching at them at least six times, with his teammate Alex Hales yards from him calling him by name, ‘Stokes, Stokes, stop, stop’, even taking hold of him on two occasions, with Stokes turning to him, aggressively demonstrating the anger and heat of the moment,” Corsellis said.

Of Stokes’s claims that there had been “nasty homophobic abuse”, Corsellis said: “If so, please tell us the details of what’s been said.”

But Stokes had said he had no recollection, Corsellis added. “There are aspects of Stokes’s case where there is zero recollection,” he said, which he said included any memory of hitting Ali or of allegedly throwing a cigarette butt at one of the gay men.

It was “selective memory”, said Corsellis. “He says he can’t say, or is it a question of won’t say, because of what the truth is?”

Of Ali, Corsellis told the jury he had turned a bottle he was drinking from into a weapon, and struck one of the couple on the shoulder. “There seems to be no excuse to use a weapon at that stage,” he said.



Anna Midgley, representing Ali, said her client had been acting in self-defence, and that in a “confusing, fast-moving situation you can mistakenly but genuinely believe you face a threat”.



Midgley continued: “He didn’t pick up the bottle to hit someone. He was drinking from it. He didn’t arm himself, but there came a time he used it because it was needed.”



She said Ali had caused a “glancing blow” only to the arm of one of the gay men, who was in his peripheral vision in the fast-moving incident, and had caused no injury.



She said that, from the beginning, Ali was saying “move away”.



“Of course, watching himself brandishing a bottle makes him feel regret and embarrassment, but regret over how you have behaved is a different question from whether you have committed a criminal offence,” Midgley told the court, adding:“He is not guilty if he genuinely perceived there was a threat.”

After summing up the evidence in the case Judge Peter Blair QC sent the jury home for the night. They will begin their deliberations at 10am on Tuesday.