Ben’s still centre of attention in the middle of nowhere
BEN STOKES went for a big one, missed, and swung his bat in frustration at the stumps. Moments later, he admitted he was ‘looking forward to getting out there and hopefully winning’.
The competitive juices are still flowing but the problem for England’s Ashes prospects was that he was in New Zealand, talking about the opening game of Canterbury’s 50-over Ford Trophy title defence against Otago at Rangiora.
Across the Tasman Sea, Stokes’s England team-mates were preparing for the second Test against Australia, while in a quiet town on the east coast of the South Island, the world’s best all-rounder was doing his penance in the nets, to the sound of birds chirping and very little else.
At one point, he asked a camera crew to move from their position on the outfield behind the bowler. Otherwise, his interaction with the media was restricted to a few reluctant platitudes in the car park. Otago were so fussed by it all that they cancelled their practice altogether.
It is possible Stokes has played cricket closer to the middle of nowhere but then again he probably hasn’t. There’s a cemetery opposite, an astroturf hockey pitch next door and a football club down the road. None could be accused of doing a roaring trade.
Inside the pavilion, old team photos of the North Canterbury Cricket Association hang lopsidedly on the wall, a reminder that New Zealand men in the 1970s liked a handlebar moustache.
Out in the middle, Stokes bowled a dozen deliveries at reasonable pace, then had two sessions with the bat — one to get his eye in, the other to launch ball after ball towards the white picket fence, the kind you get at a Home Counties lawn-bowls club.
Canterbury’s players and officials sound thrilled to have him here while he awaits the decision of the Crown Prosecution Service over the Bristol brawl that left a man with a fractured eye socket and Stokes with a broken finger. The attitude is one of upbeat buck-passing.
‘Ben is just desperate to play cricket,’ said Canterbury head coach Gary Stead. ‘I hope his performances show why he is regarded as one of the best all-rounders in the world.
‘He really reminded me of a young kid just wanting to get out there and play.
‘There has been more media around but I don’t see it as a problem. One, it is very good for our game and secondly it is great for our players to get used to that, because if they want to play higher they will get that extra media speculation about playing for New Zealand.’
Brendon Donkers, who has special responsibility for Canterbury’s white-ball teams, put it this way: ‘Some people are saying we’d be foolish if we didn’t play him, and some say we’d be foolish to play him.
‘But from a cricket perspective it is fantastic. For domestic cricket in this country to have this sort of exposure leading into a Ford Trophy game is outstanding and that is alongside a Black Caps Test in Wellington and an Ashes Test in Adelaide. The fact our domestic game is on the map is brilliant.’
Stokes, born in Christchurch, about 18 miles south of Rangiora, has an agreement with the club that he doesn’t have to speak to journalists. He did, though, offer a local TV crew a bit of diplomacy before driving away down the Coldstream Road.
‘I’d been working hard back home, so it’ll be good to put into practice,’ he said.
Did he sense lots of interest from Cantabrians? ‘Yeah, I think there is. I think it’ll be good for the club as well.’
And what of his new team-mates? ‘I knew a few of the younger guys because they’d been coming over to Durham on an exchange programme. It is always hard coming into a new team when you’re meeting them for the first time, so it was nice to see a few friendly faces.’
The welcome has not been unanimous. The club’s former captain and New Zealand Test opener Peter Fulton called Stokes’s inclusion ‘messy’.
The messiness is compounded by the absence from the Canterbury side of 23-year-old batsman Ken McClure, who stood down after pleading guilty to assault on a pre-season tour and will be sentenced in January.
But the ECB issued Stokes with a No-Objection Certificate, perhaps in the hope that the wheels of justice would allow him to play in the Ashes and New Zealand Cricket chose to abide by the decision of Canterbury, who are grateful for the free publicity. Pragmatism has prevailed.
And while New Zealand cricketers do not sledge with the self-entitlement of their Australian counterparts, yesterday’s Christchurch Press newspaper led with a message from Otago captain Jimmy Neesham: ‘It’s not like Don Bradman is walking out to bat for Canterbury.’
Neesham continued: ‘No one is overawed by him. He’s another player and anyone can get a duck, anyone can get a hundred, and hopefully he gets the former on Sunday.’
Even in a sleepy corner of a sleepy country, Ben Stokes can’t quite get away from it all.