Ice and fire

It’s hard to appreciate what you have until it’s gone. For many years, since 2013, English cricket arguably featured our greatest ever batsman, Joe Root, our greatest ever bowler, Jimmy Anderson, and our most exciting player of all time, Ben Stokes.

Stokes, who is retiring from international cricket, completed a trio of England’s greatest ever all-rounders, joining Ian Botham and Andrew Flintoff. Like the two earlier greats, he has had a phenomenal ability to turn a game around. He confirmed his talismanic status at the weekend by taking a wicket immediately after his retirement had been announced.

All of England’s great all-rounders had career defining triumphs against Australia. Botham had his 149 at Headingley in 1981. Flintoff had his 102 at Trent Bridge in 2005. Ben Stokes’s iconic 135 at Headingley in 2019 might have been the best innings of all, given the pressure he was facing when Australia needed just a wicket to secure the match.

Weeks earlier, Stokes had won the One Day International World Cup for England with an ice-cold 84 against New Zealand. “It was like the whole world had come down on me,” a devastated Stokes had said in 2016 after Carlos Brathwaite had hit him for a quartet of boundaries to win the World T20 Cup for the West Indies. Time and again, over the following decade, Stokes would prove that this kind of pressure would not break him.

In an age of T20 — as well as whatever “The Hundred” is — Stokes did more than anyone to prove that test cricket could be the most exciting form of the game. His 258 against South Africa in Cape Town in 2016 was among the most devastating innings of all time — the sort of innings that could make a bowler not just retire but change their identity and disappear. This kind of destructiveness is all the more special in test cricket for being the exception. Something is more memorable if it was not meant to happen.

Stokes could be a destroyer with the ball as well. His 6 for 22 against the West Indies in 2017 was a masterclass in swing bowling. But for all his standout moments, he was also a workhorse. Only Jacques Kallis has scored more runs while taking over 250 wickets.

As captain of the English side, working in partnership with head coach Brendan McCullum, Stokes has pioneered the attacking form of cricket that has been described as “Bazball”. This approach has run its course, as Patrick Porter has written, but at its best it made for thrilling cricket. England’s savage treatment of Pakistan in 2022 was unforgettable. Nasser Hussain called Stokes’s performance as captain in Rawalpindi “one of the greatest exhibitions of Test captaincy” he had ever seen.

Of course, Stokes has had tough personal times throughout his career. He was found not guilty of affray after a fight outside a nightclub in 2017. It appears that Stokes was not the aggressor in another nightclub incident this summer — but it has been reported that he was breaching a team curfew. Some might well suspect that the 35-year-old should have put his clubbing days behind him. (I say this as a 35-year-old who has put his clubbing days behind himself.)

I’m sure that he has inspired the next generation of English cricket players

It’s a shame if tensions with the England and Wales Cricket Board, over this and other incidents, has precipitated Stokes’s retirement. Certainly, one can’t be shocked when the most sensational and unpredictable performers end up in some amount of trouble off the pitch. Can we be surprised if an athletic enigma turns out to be a personal enigma too? Stokes has been eloquent on the subject of the mental health challenges he has faced since his trial in 2018 and the death of his father in 2020. Hopefully, retirement will be restorative.

More informed commentators can assess the state of English cricket as Stokes departs, and I am not denying that it is less than wholly positive, but grievances and worries should not overshadow our perspective on a great career. As an expat whose cricket interest has waned in a country where the sport is not just unpopular but a complete mystery, his outrageous performances kept me interested. England will miss him, but I’m sure that he has inspired the next generation of English cricket players.