Stokes takes quick route to achieving legend status
Redemption tale ends with all-rounder joining greats of English sport in one glorious summer
In buttery September light and with shadows lengthening the way cricket scribes love them to, Ben Stokes reached the end of his eternal summer. This was the high season that located him not just in English cricket’s pantheon, but as one of the legends of English sport.
If Stokes needed one last flourish for 2019, how about diving low and fast at leg gully to scoop a ball pushed in his direction by Steve Smith, the nemesis. With an acrobatic catch completed, Stokes found himself giving a piggyback to Joe Root, who jumped on him from behind in celebration. All through this series – a losing one for England under the Ashes “retention” tradition – Root’s men have ridden on Stokes’s phenomenal appetite for battle.
On day four of the Oval Test, Smith, who amassed 774 runs in four Tests, was gone for an unusually puny 23. Such is Smith’s stickability that England needed
him to go early for a 2-2 draw in the series to remain the probable outcome. And when England need something big doing, Stokes is always there with his hand raised.
Greatness usually takes more than a summer to attain, but Stokes has taken the quick route from May to September, becoming a national inspiration.
People have enthused about him as they did the household names of cricket’s golden age. When England’s “summer of cricket” finally expired here in Kennington, Stokes had done more than anyone to re-popularise the game.
It takes more than talent to shine all summer long, to keep making the difference, to continually rescue your team and turn up every day with the same urge to go nose to nose with the opposition. Call it a need, more than an urge, because Stokes has that inbuilt loathing of being pushed around or even conceding an inch.
He lives for the contest and the conflict – a fact acknowledged by Australia’s cricketers, whose constant references in sledges to “Bristol” failed to make the slightest dent in his armour.
It is a strange kind of heckling that invites an already megacompetitive opponent to go into overdrive to shut you up. The Bristol street brawl that landed Stokes in Bristol Crown Court, and which Australia tried to exploit, has been transcended on just about every level by a man whose 135 not
‘I’ll look back on Headingley with fond memories, but I’d swap it for winning the Ashes’
out at Headingley was the most sustained display of spirit and defiance you are ever likely to see on a cricket ground.
In the World Cup final against New Zealand, Stokes held the England innings together with an unbeaten 84, during which a Kiwi throw-in earned him six runs from a deflection off his bat (it should have been five, but providence, or umpiring errors, came to his assistance), that hauled his side to a brain-melting super over for which he strode back out.
The redemption story might have ended there. Stokes might have been chalked up in history as the classic World Cup final hero who had just scaled the summit of his professional career, never to reach those heights again. Most players would settle for that. Instead, he fixed his attention on the kind of acclaim sprayed on Ian Botham in 1981 and Andrew Flintoff in 2005: as the all-rounder compelled by some unquenchable urge to take on a nation by himself.
Or, we assume he fixed his gaze on that. Maybe he lives off his instincts, relighting his fire each day. Yet we know his return to the side for the Sri Lanka series coincided with a renewed dedication to training. People who go to court and are cleared (as he was) can go one of two ways. They
can claim vindication and carry on as before, or it can scare them into holding on more tightly to what they almost lost. Stokes took the second of those paths, training in the gym like a demon and sacrificing himself ever more faithfully to the needs of the team.
There is still a County Championship to settle and a T20 Finals Day to enjoy, but the fall of Josh Hazlewood’s wicket at the Oval felt like the end of one of English cricket’s finest chapters. The duel between Jofra Archer and Matthew Wade was one last pyrotechnic display on a day when Stokes stepped up in the fading light to receive his award as England’s man of the series.
“I’ll look back on Headingley in a few years’ time with fond memories probably, but I’d swap it for winning the Ashes still,” he said. Unable to bowl at the Oval on account of a shoulder injury, Stokes ends the series as England’s leading run-scorer by a margin of 51 over Rory Burns, with 441 at an average of 55. Those mere numbers cannot convey the valour of his innings at Headingley, which elevated rearguard Test-match batting to a noble art and will always play in the showreel of special Ashes days.
By the biggest measure of winning and losing these were the Steve Smith Ashes, but for England the hearts-and-minds campaign was led by a feisty all-rounder who pulled his own career from the fire and directed his wild passion straight at the world’s best 50-over teams, then at Australia, in ways that made cricket feel like a game that will always hold us in its wonderful spell.