Ben Stokes: The man who refused to be silenced, then left to you | Cricket News
There is a particular cruelty in the way Ben Stokes chose to retire. On the fourth afternoon at Trent Bridge, with the Test still alive and tea approaching, he announced that this would be his last match for England. Not at the end of a series, neatly wrapped up in a guard of honor and an orchestral montage, but half the story, the way he seemed to play most of his cricket. Ek lamha ruk jao – wait a moment – and the moment had already passed.I’ve spent a good part of my adult life being told that Test cricket is dying, that five-day cricket is a colonial relic awaiting the euthanasia of the attention economy. And then along came a Christchurch-born, Cumbria-bred left-hander who decided, almost single-handedly and certainly single-handedly, that the patient wasn’t going to go quietly. They called it Bazball, after the coach, because the English always preferred to name their revolutions after someone definitely Antipodean. Yet it was Stokes who batted as if the scorecard was a personal affront, who declared when sensible men settled for survival, and who turned dead rubbers and lost causes into the only kind of cricket he seemed interested in.There is Headingley in 2019, of course, because there still is. England had been bowled out for 67 in the first innings, chasing 359, slumped to 286 for 9, and possessed only Jack Leach, whose contribution amounted to the cricketing equivalent of moral support. What followed was less an innings than an argument with probability itself. Stokes won because, somehow, Stokes usually did. Leach’s solitary run became one of the most celebrated singles in cricket history, while at the other end a man seemed determined to convince mathematics that he had overestimated his authority.
The numbers, as impressive as they are, still felt a little inadequate. More than 7,200 Test runs, more than 240 wickets before this final match concludes, fourteen Test centuries, and a batting average that critics continue to wave as if it settles an argument. Nothing settles down. Stokes has never been an average man. I belong to moments, and moments have an inconvenient habit of resisting arithmetic. The 258 at Cape Town, the fastest Test 250 ever scored, tells you more about him than any spreadsheet could. The medium is for actuaries. Stokes dealt in extremes, in tamasha, in the improbable stories that grandparents tell children who politely pretend they’ve never heard them before.
What I came back to, however, is that the first half of his career looked nothing like a hagiography. There was Bristol, the brawl, the arrest, the missing ashes, the stripped vice-captaincy, and a reputation that seemed beyond repair. There was Carlos Brathwaite in Calcutta, sending four consecutive deliveries into the stands and, with them, any comfortable assumption that sporting redemption follows a straight line. For a while, Stokes became the cautionary tale of English cricket.That he rebuilt himself in his consciousness is, perhaps, the greatest success. He spoke openly about mental health when elite sport still regarded vulnerability as an administrative error. I’ve walked away from the game indefinitely and, in doing so, quietly allowed others to do the same. I captained a body that often seemed held together by surgery, stubbornness and faith in almost equal measure. These are the innings that top rollers rarely play.And so it goes, not at the end of the series, where convention would have preferred it, but in the middle of a Test match, with tea looming and the result undecided. It’s the most Ben Stokes finish imaginable. For over a decade, I played as if the odds were just another opponent to be wiped out. Now he chose to announce the end before the party itself has one.Khuda Hafiz, Ben.The fourth innings will always have scoreboards and statistics. It may take more time before you find another man willing to treat both as mere suggestions.
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