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During my years in cricket (a total of five summer terms at secondary school before we were allowed to give it up and “do” tennis instead), I naturally gained a detailed understanding from the frontline of the way the sport works. And what I understood in particular was the absolute importance to the game of tea. Cricket teas, I rapidly came to appreciate, were their own shining subset of the broader “tea” category, and likely, if you were lucky, to feature Mr Kipling French fancies. With their unmistakable hi-vis icing, their uncompromisingly bright yellow sponge, and their potentially roof-lifting sugar hit, it’s no exaggeration to say that these thrillingly individual cake portions bound me to the game back then, and I was not alone. Incidentally, Mr Kipling French fancies are sometimes referred to as “fondant fancies”, but as people who truly know cake will tell you, that’s the generic term, distinct from the registred trademark successfully applied for by Mr Kipling as long ago as 1967 and robustly traded under ever since. It’s important to be accurate about these things – and also to accept no imitations. Anyway, Mr Kipling French fancies practically defined my cricketing days. Would it be fair, accordingly, to describe the cricket I knew as having “a cake culture”? Certainly, and without hesitation. Cake was embedded in the game we played. But did that mean, by extension, that we had “a cake problem”? That’s a far more complicated, even emotional, question. Ben Stokes made headlines last week when he said that cricket as a whole has “a drinking culture”. But even within that confession Stokes felt protectively inclined to rebut the notion that the England set-up has “a drinking problem” – “such an extreme thing to put on a team,” he said. I guess the question then becomes: where does “a culture” end and “a problem” begin? Suppose, back in my day, we had gone on consuming French fancies after games, into the evening, and we had ended up in nightclubs, stuffed full of fondant icing and getting into punch-ups with rugby players. Or suppose we’d downed loads of Mr Kipling’s finest one time and appeared on social media in videos shot in the Australian coastal resort of Noosa, clearly high on vanilla cream filling and covered in crumbs. Would we have been forced to concede that, in our case, “a cake culture” was now “a cake problem”? I just don’t know. Anyway, it’s entirely hypothetical because we weren’t doing that at all. But maybe, on reflection, this whole culture/problem distinction is a bit of a blind alley for the debate we need to be having. I think back to a memorable exchange in ITV’s recent World Cup coverage, where Mark Pougatch raised the “amazing longevity now among footballers” – Ronaldo at 41, Messi at 39, Modric at 40, etc. To which Gary Neville said, “I’m going to keep it really simple, Mark, on this one. Players have stopped drinking alcohol. Honestly, I think it’s a massive game-changer. Sports science, medical, of course: but honestly, alcohol brings injuries and that will end your career.” And alongside him Duncan Ferguson said, “Well, I’ve had 10 operations.” Newsletters Choose the newsletters you want to receive View more For information about how The Observer protects your data, read our Privacy Policy “No more questions, your honour,” Pougatch replied. The point is, in football these days, when people talk about “a drinking culture” at a club, they’re nearly always talking about something regrettable, often inherited by an incoming manager, that needs or needed eradication before things could get any better. The assumption is, fairly automatically, that, for elite football, “a drinking culture” is “a drinking problem”. So what if the same thing applies to England cricket? We can go down all sorts of philosophical and semantic rabbit holes in this debate, but in the end maybe it’s all irrelevant if we can agree to leave the potentially inflammatory term “drinking problem” out of the conversation and simply admit that “a drinking culture” is, for sport, its own complication, or certainly seems to have been for England cricket. It definitely simplifies the argument, no? What are your thoughts on this? Email us at letters@observer.co.uk Photograph: YouTube