Ben Stokes: The man who refused to leave quietly, then left the tea Cricket News:
There is a particular ferocity in the way Ben Stokes chose to retire. On the fourth afternoon at Trent Bridge, with the Test still alive and tea approaching, he announced that this would be his last match for England. Not at the end of a series, neatly wrapped up in a guard of honor and an orchestral montage, but in the middle of the story, the way he seems to play most of his cricket. Ek lamha ruk jao—wait a moment—and the moment is gone.I spent a fair part of my adult life being told that Test cricket was dying, that five-day cricket was a colonial relic awaiting euthanasia in the attention economy. And then along came a left-hander born in Christchurch and raised in Cumbria, who decided, almost alone and certainly alone, that the patient was not silent. They called it Bazball, after the coach, because the English always preferred to name their revolutions after a safe Antipodean. However, it was Stokes who won as the scorecard was a personal insult, declaring when the good guys live, and who turned the dead rubber and lost cause into the only kind of cricket that seemed to interest him.There will be Headingley in 2019, of course, because there always is. England lost for 67 in the first innings, chasing 359, stumbled for 286 for 9, and had only Jack Leach, whose contribution amounted to the cricketing equivalent of moral support. What followed was less an innings than an argument with possibility itself. Stokes won because, in a way, it was mostly Stokes. Leach’s solitary run became one of the most famous singles in cricket history, while at the other end a man appeared determined to convince mathematics that it had exaggerated its authority.
The numbers, impressive though they are, often feel inadequate. Over 7,200 Test runs, over 240 wickets before the end of this final match, fourteen Test centuries, and a batting average that critics keep waving as if it settles an argument. It is not settled. Stokes is not an ordinary man. He belongs to moments, and moments have an inconvenient habit of resisting arithmetic. 258 in Cape Town, the fastest Test 250 ever scored, tells you more about him than any spreadsheet could. The mean is for actuaries. Stokes deals with the extreme, with the tamasha, with the unlikely stories that grandparents tell children who politely pretend they’ve never heard them before.
What I keep coming back to, though, is that the first half of his career doesn’t read like a hagiography. There’s Bristol, the brawl, the arrest, the missed Ashes, the stripped-down vice-captain, and a reputation that’s gone bad. There was Kolkata’s Carlos Brathwaite, sending four successive deliveries into the stands and, with them, every comforting assumption that the game’s redemption followed a straight line. For a while, Stokes became a warning sign of English cricket.That he rebuilt himself in his conscience, perhaps, the greatest achievement. He spoke openly about mental health when elite sports are still considered weak as an administrative error. He left the game forever and, in doing so, quietly allowed others to do the same. He captained a body that always seemed to combine surgery, toughness and faith in almost equal measure. Those are the innings that highlight reels rarely replay.And so he left, not at the end of the series, where convention would have preferred him, but in the middle of a Test match, with tea approaching and the result undecided. This is the most imaginative ending to Ben Stokes. For more than a decade, he played as if the odds were just a weak opponent. Now he chose to announce the end before the match had one.Khuda hafiz, Ben.The fourth inning always has scoreboards and statistics. It may take some time before she finds another man who is willing to treat both as propositions.
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