Innings in game’s top five

WHEN Australia lost an Ashes Test by three runs at the MCG in 1982, a heartbroken Jeff Thomson took five years to speak about it … to anybody.

Thirty-seven years later, he still can’t bring himself to discuss it with Allan Border, the batsman at the other end who watched “Thommo’’ recoil in horror as he edged Ian Botham to the slips for the final wicket, ending a 70-run stand.

The moral of the story, says Thommo, is that Ashes pain never truly dies.

Nathan Lyon, who missed a run-out, Marcus Harris, who dropped a catch, and Tim Paine and Pat Cummins, who fluffed a review, are somewhere in Leeds dealing with the pain of the could-have, should-have, might-have been.

Now that the world has drawn breath, the challenge is to decide where Ben Stokes’s century sits in the 2357-match history of Test cricket.

London Telegraph correspondent Scyld Berry declared it the finest Test innings by an Englishman.

By coincidence, the two it beat were both at Headingley, Graham Gooch’s 154 against the West Indies in 1991 and Ian Botham’s rampaging 149 that brought England back from the dead in 1981.

With England facing the acute embarrassment of losing the Ashes three Tests into the series, êtokes somehow conjured up the greatest run chase in its Test history with a No.11 whose glasses kept fogging up.

Stokes’s innings must surely rate in the top five played. It’s in the company of the 281 by V.V.S. Laxman in Kolkata when India had followed on and was all but out of the series against an Australian side chasing a 17th successive Test victory.

For a “one man against the world’’ feel, it stands with Brian Lara’s 153 not out against Australia in Barbados when he arrived at 3-78, still 230 from the target, and somehow saw his team home.

Don Bradman’s best work clogs the leaderboard, including a Headingley masterpiece — his 173 not out as a 40-year-old in 1948 when Australia chased down a victory target of 403.

But this much is certain no one could have contemplated scoring 76 off the last 10 overs for the last wicket, scooping Cummins with a ramp-shot six or reverse-sweeping Lyon high into the terraces when one false move would have given Australia the Ashes.

Stokes was part tortoise, part hare, part old-fashioned warrior, part modern showman, part cement, part desperation, part calculation. It’s hard to compare his innings to anything else because the game has not seen one quite like it and may never do so again.