Ben Stokes, until very recently captain of the England cricket team, isn’t playing in the second Test match of the series against New Zealand which starts at The Oval on Wednesday. His misdeed? Breaching the team’s midnight curfew at the Rex Rooms nightclub in Chelsea when celebrating victory in the first game.

Stokes’s new nickname should also capture the essence of the man

Let others argue about discipline, a captain’s duties, team culture and the stern machinery of something that calls itself ‘the Cricket Regulator’ (no, me neither). What troubles me is something much more fundamental. If English cricket really is serious about standards, then the clean-up has to start where standards have fallen furthest. So really the burning question is: why is one of the greatest cricketers that England has ever produced still being referred to as ‘Stokesy’?

He deserves better than this nothing nickname. The 35-year-old Stokes’s heroic deeds in recent years have been genuine ‘Boys’ Own’ stuff. His match-winning and series-saving innings of 135 not out at Headingley in 2019, for example, was hailed as ‘unequivocally the finest ever played for England’. He has already scored more than 7,000 runs and taken nearly 250 wickets for the national team. Hopefully there’s plenty more to come.

A player of Stokes’s stature needs a sobriquet to match. Adding the suffix –y to a surname is the lazy, default procedure: Straussy, Rooty, Woakesy, Belly, Trotty, Carsey – the list is endless. No, ‘Stokesy’ is far too routine and much too commonplace for such a distinguished cricketer.

Stokes’s predecessors as great English all-rounders were never treated like that. Ian Botham was never, thank goodness, ‘Bothamy’. He was ‘Beefy’, in honour of his broad-shouldered, barrel-chested physique and of course his healthy appetite. Andrew Flintoff was never, heaven forbid, ‘Flintoffy’. He was always ‘Freddie’ after the cartoon character Fred Flintstone. That was vivid, affectionate and instantly right.

Stokes deserves some of the wit of yesteryear. Geoffrey Graham Arnold was ‘Horse’, because his initials were G.G. Chris Old was ‘Chilly’, because he was C. Old. David Steele, with his grey hair, steel-rimmed spectacles and unhelmeted defiance of Lillee and Thomson, became ‘the bank clerk who went to war’. (Notoriously reluctant to buy a round, he was also sometimes known as ‘Crime’, on the grounds that crime doesn’t pay.)

And as well as being witty, Stokes’s new nickname should also capture the essence of the man. The otherwise mild-mannered Derek Underwood, the Kent and England bowler who once took 8 for 9 while demolishing Sussex on a wet Hastings pitch, was known as ‘Deadly’ because, in such conditions, that’s exactly what he was. At Brisbane in the 1958-59 Ashes, Trevor Bailey made first-class cricket’s slowest ever half century in 357 minutes: they called him ‘The Barnacle’.

A few years earlier the erudite Frank ‘Typhoon’ Tyson terrorised Australian batsmen not only by quoting Wordsworth at them – ‘For still, the more he works, the more/Do his weak ankles swell’ – but also by bowling so extraordinarily fast. And the West Indies great Michael Holding was known as ‘Whispering Death’ – the umpires couldn’t hear him as he accelerated towards the crease before unleashing his ferociously fast and lethally accurate deliveries.

Stokes’s many magnificent exploits merit an epithet that recognises that he’s cricketing royalty. He’d be in good company; Wasim Akram was ‘The Sultan of Swing’ and Brian Lara – who once scored 400 not out against England and 501 not out against Stokes’s county, Durham – was ‘The Prince’. Not forgetting Ashley Giles, ‘The King of Spin’ (when a misprint on his testimonial mugs turned that into ‘The King of Spain’, the Barmy Army took to serenading him from the boundary ropes with Y Viva España).

Stokes will, one hopes, soon be back to resume his magnificent career. But a new chapter calls for a new nickname: something witty, monosyllabic and, given his majestic achievements, unmistakably regal. It should honour the deeds while giving a nod to the scene of his recent misdeed. Perhaps henceforth he could be known as ‘Rex’.