Ben Stokes ready to play IPL next year as England hope for ODI ‘unretirement’
Ben Stokes is set to put his name forward for next year’s Indian Premier League amid a hope from England that he reverses his retirement from ODI cricket and defends the 50-over World Cup.
The 31-year-old all-rounder trimmed his focus to Test captaincy and Twenty20 cricket during the summer citing an unsustainable schedule but, after he powered England to double-world champion status with victory over Pakistan in Sunday’s final, the head coach, Matthew Mott, has not given up on a rethink.
“He’s a three-dimensional player and he has so much to offer,” Mott said. “In this team he was the glue – I think we have a lot of guys who can do extraordinary things but he was the player you knew that if he was in you’d win the game.
“When he spoke to me about his ODI retirement one of the first things I said was that I’d back any decision he made, but I said to him he didn’t necessarily have to retire, he could just not play 50-overs for a while. And I said: ‘You could always unretire.’
“That’s his decision. It’s going to be a World Cup year and we don’t play much T20 cricket for a while, but it will be up to him. The more we can get him is great. He’s doing an amazing job with the Test captaincy but he is a very big cog in the wheel when he comes back to white-ball.”
Stokes may well stick to his current course and is understood to be entering the IPL auction in Bangalore on 23 December. He was released from a £1.3m contract at Rajasthan Royals in 2021 and, after that summer’s fourmonth break for mental health reasons, opted out of this year’s edition.
If Stokes is sold to one of the 10 franchises – his T20 World Cup exploits furthering this prospect – it will mean a hectic workload before the effort to regain the Ashes starts next June; after winter Test tours to Pakistan and New Zealand, the IPL runs from 25 March until 28 May, just four days before a one-off Test against Ireland at Lord’s.
While Stokes will head to the UAE for a short break before Test preparations begin, with Liam Livingstone, Mark Wood and Harry Brook the other cross-format players, England’s shift of white-ball focus to 50-over cricket happens immediately. The first of three ODIs against Australia is scheduled for Thursday, just over 72 hours after the T20 World Cup victory party wound down morning.
“It’s not ideal, I can’t lie,” Mott said on Monday yesterday of the scheduling. “We’ve got to enjoy this victory – they don’t come around very often so there’ll be no disguising the fact that we will enjoy this. We’ll have a good day today, we had a great night last night. We’ve got to turn up and make sure we put out a great effort. For the white-ball team we get through those three games and then there’s a long break, so that’ll be the time to properly let our hair down and enjoy it.”
Ten days after England won the ODI World Cup in 2019 they played a Test against Ireland, with an Ashes series starting shortly after that. “It’s been happening for a while,” said Moeen Ali. “Having a game in three days’ time, it’s horrible. As a group we want to enjoy and celebrate and have that [time], because we put so much into it. As players we’re kind of getting used to it now, but to give 100% all the time is difficult when you’re playing every two or three days.”
Mott revealed that both Wood and Dawid Malan, having missed the semi-final through injury, had been fit enough to play at the MCG on Sunday but had not been selected. “Probably the hardest thing leading into the final was talking to them. Jos and I spoke to them individually and it was a tough one,” Mott said. “Both worked hard to get fit and they were tough conversations, because they were both desperate to play, but we thought the guys that had come in [for the semi-final] had shown a lot and deserved to keep their place.
“They both wanted to play and you felt like you were breaking two blokes’ hearts, but I’m not a big one for taking a risk in big games on players that have had injuries, if you’ve got players that can do the job as well. That at the end is where we landed.”
While Wood will strive to be fit for the three-Test series in Pakistan next month, the hosts have suffered a blow with the news that Shaheen Shah Afridi is ruled out completely after the knee injury suffered during England’s run chase.
The ECB has revealed that the peak
audience of 3.14 million for Sunday’s final came at 11.36am GMT, just as
Stokes hit the winning runs. Overall, just under 5 million viewers watched at least three minutes of the live coverage across Channel 4 and Sky Sports in the UK.