Proteas are up against the deadly pair
KOLKATA, 2016. Carlos Brathwaite’s fourth six has not yet landed, but Ben Stokes is already crouching on the Eden Gardens turf, numb with horror. The West Indies players are storming the field. The World Twenty20 final is lost.
Consumed by their own dismay, Stokes’s England teammates initially seem unsure how best to handle the situation. Chris Jordan offers a consoling word. Liam Plunkett bends over and taps him on the back. Most of the rest simply loiter awkwardly at the fringes, empty of words, empty of energy, empty of emotions.
Then Joe Root walks over. The pair have known each other since they were 13. They share an agent. And as the West Indies players cavort around them, celebrating their World Twenty20 victory, Root crouches down beside Stokes, urging him to leave the field with dignity.
“Keep your head up,” he says over and over again. “Do not let them see you are hurting.” Blinking back tears, Stokes lifted his head and slowly stood up. And amid one of the greatest traumas of their careers, there was a moment that cemented the bond between them. “It was absolutely my first instinct,” Root would later say.
Back then, of course, they were just mates trying to cheer each other up. Now they are England’s captain and vice-captain. And the relationship between these two men, both products of northern state schools, born just five months apart, will define English cricket for years to come.
Like many male friendships, it is built not simply on affection or mutual respect, but on a riotous insincerity.
They bicker on the golf course. They mercilessly take the mickey out of each other. When England returned to Barbados in 2015, a year after Stokes broke a hand hitting a locker, it was Root’s idea to tape padding to Stokes’s locker as a practical joke.
The ease with which they riff off each other reflects the depth of a friendship that goes back more than half their lives. They first met at county U13 level – Root playing for Yorkshire, Stokes for Cumbria – but the first bridges were really built at the Bunbury Festival, David English’s annual jamboree for talented schoolboy players.
“He was a podgy little mediumpacer back then,” Root remembered with a grin on his unveiling as captain. “He was always in your face, letting you know he was there.”
It was during that tournament that the now-infamous Nando’s incident occurred, in which Stokes put periperi sauce in Root’s glass of Coke while he went to the lavatory.
In many ways, their careers have run in parallel, although not always at the same pace. Having played together at the U19 World Cup in 2010, it was Stokes who broke into the England side the following year.
Root had to wait until 2012 for his chance, but while Root seized his with both hands, Stokes stuttered and stagnated, his mercurial temper and penchant for a night out resulting in him being cast to the peripheries.
The summer of for both.
One of the best arguments for Root 2015 was transformative batting at four rather than three, is that it keeps him closer to Stokes in the batting order. There is an argument that Root is at his best when he is allowed to bat around a more aggressive partner, and when the pair buddy up, sparks tend to fly.
Nowhere was this more apparent than in the Lord’s Test against New Zealand. Early in the partnership, Root chastised Stokes for tapping a pull shot to fine leg for a single. “Forget that,” Root told him. “Just whack it. That’s what you do.”
From 30/4, Root and Stokes put on 161 in 32 overs, setting up a thrilling victory that brokered the terms of English cricket’s new dawn.
Two years on, another new dawn beckons. There have been suggestions that Stokes will be the “bad cop” to Root’s “good cop” – the John Prescott to Root’s Tony Blair – but things may be a little more nuanced than that.
After all, the captain is rarely the most popular person in the team. They take bowlers off. They read out the riot act. They drop players. Captains can never be the life and soul of the party; they have too much blood on their hands.
Instead, it is Stokes who will be the heartbeat of the side: the net mentor, the dressing-room confidant, the sledger-in-chief. It helps that, at least in the short-term, he has no designs on the captaincy himself. For now, Stokes will get stuck in with bat and ball, daring everyone to put in less effort than him.
Outside the hours of 11am to 6.30pm, then, Stokes can be relied upon to banter his captain off relentlessly. Once they cross the boundary line, however, he and Root will stand side by side in the heat of battle. Root had Stokes’s back on that muggy Kolkata night, and as Root steps out as England captain for the first time, he knows Stokes will have his. It is, after all, what friends are for. — The Daily Telegraph