If England were going to get their Test cricket back on track, Ben Stokes rediscovering his best form was a non-negotiable element. He balances the side, gives the dressing room its energy and deals in the currencies any team prizes — runs and wickets. There has been too much talk about a red-ball reset and not enough about a red-head reset — let us get a bit more out of Jonny Bairstow and a lot more out of Stokes.
The Tests in Antigua and Barbados provide incontrovertible evidence that Stokes is back. His hunger to perform has been evident since the earliest days of the tour, when he trained so hard during the warm-up match at Coolidge. He has looked utterly focused and, having shared a few honest meetings with the other players, has rationalised the Ashes nightmare.
Joe Root thinks that he is being hard on himself, but Stokes believes that he was not fit enough in Australia and could not do the things he wanted. He is doing them now, all right. He got through 41 overs in the first Test — we had been told he may not bowl much at all — and gave away nothing; his match return was three for 66. Here in Barbados he was intent on having an impact with the bat.
He had a long session in the nets before the start — some estimates put it at an hour — and played himself in with all the care of a man on a mission. He did not take long to get going and when he did he put the bowlers to the sword.
In Australia, his back-and-across movements made it easier for him to defend, but harder to score; now he is standing still and giving himself room to swing his arms and launch the ball into the far beyond. It has been the best part of two years since he played an uninhibited innings of this size and sort. As he used to do in his pomp, he bought England time with the speed of his scoring, and England will need time if they are to take 20 wickets on this pitch.
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In the dark days of Australia, when Root’s future as captain hung in the balance, Stokes, 30, was seen as a potential alternative. Now we are in the Caribbean, Root has cemented his authority with two hundreds and a strong performance in the field in Antigua and Stokes could not have shown himself more motivated in his role as first lieutenant.
The past 20 months have been a turbulent time for Stokes and it is little wonder that his cricket during this period was so uneven. Before belatedly signing up for the Ashes tour, he had appeared in only four of England’s previous 14 Tests, so it should have been no great surprise that he has taken time to find his best rhythm with bat and ball.
He is now on his seventh Test in succession since early December and the benefits of more regular cricket, and the regular training that goes with it, are becoming apparent. He had just had one of his best all-round Tests against West Indies at Old Trafford in July 2020 when he learnt of his father Ged’s declining health and that he would need to leave to see him in New Zealand. He briefly returned to playing before his father died in December 2020, but he missed the Sri Lanka leg of the Asia Test tour early last year. Then came his serious finger injury at the Indian Premier League.
The first surgical operation did not solve the problem and kept him out of cricket for a prolonged spell; when he attempted a comeback he found the pain excruciating. The frustration this caused, combined with the psychological impact of his father’s death, pushed him into a difficult place.
He articulated this in a newspaper column after announcing his availability for the Australia tour following a second operation on his finger which brought almost immediate relief — he was back in the nets within days.
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The finger was a big issue but, he conceded, “I had also been struggling with bubble-life and events off the field. I don’t want anyone to feel the way I did because I wasn’t in a good place and I’m not afraid to admit it. I was in a real dark place and having some difficult thoughts.”
Stokes must now feel like a completely different person from the one he was describing there.
Between that man of the match performance at Old Trafford in 2020 and this West Indies tour, Stokes’s Test returns amounted to 517 runs and 11 wickets; in the equivalent period up to and including that game his returns were 1,179 runs and 39 wickets. It is not difficult to equate Stokes’s personal decline with the tail-off in England’s results.
As chance had it, head coach Trevor Bayliss got the best of Stokes and Chris Silverwood the not-so-good. The success of whoever takes full-time charge of the team may depend on the extent of the renaissance of this remarkable, indefatigable all-rounder.
‘I upped the tempo so we could have a bowl’
By Simon Wilde
Ben Stokes said that his century in the Barbados Test was one he would cherish more than most given all that had happened to him recently, but he was more concerned about what impact his runs would have on England’s chances of forcing a win. Stokes’s innings of 120 from 128 balls was his eleventh hundred in Tests and his first since July 2020.
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“Playing in a team sport, you never like to think of anything in a selfish way,” Stokes said. Of the hundreds I’ve got personally that’s probably one of the more memorable ones with everything that’s gone on over the last 18 months, two years. So it’s a very special feeling.
“I felt good out there but I think a lot of credit must go to Joe [Root] and Dan [Lawrence]. They set today up to allow the middle order to go and free their arms. You have to look at the game situation and seize these opportunities when you are so far ahead, so I thought I would try and put pressure onto the West Indies bowlers.
“I was thinking quite far ahead actually and thought it would be nice to have a bowl at them tonight with some big runs on the board. So it went well.”
Stokes celebrated his hundred with an emotional gesture to the skies in memory of his father Ged who died in December 2020. It was his first hundred since then.
“In India I got 99 [in a one-day international in March 2021] and it was a bit of a dagger in the heart. It was nice to get there [today] and remember him that way. I don’t like to speak selfishly but it was nice feeling out there to look up to the sky.”
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He said that the situation in which he scored his runs was reminiscent of Cape Town in 2016 when he struck a career-best 258.
“It was a similar situation back then, loads of runs on the board and I felt like putting my foot down on the accelerator. If I got out trying to do that we’ve got a long enough batting line up to get us up to a formidable total. It was good to spend time in the middle and get some runs [but] you’re only as good as your next knock or your next bowling innings.”
West Indies v England: Second Test
Day three, Friday 2pm
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