We need to talk about Ben again. I know, I know. It’s tiresome. It’s been hard to get away from Ben Stokes ever since this ghost of an England World Cup campaign started, but at first that was because he was unfit to play and it seemed as though the team would never regain their mojo until he was back on the field.
But he has been in the side for three games now and, sad to say, he has not brought with him the best version of himself as a batsman, but rather something approximating the worst. Mark Wood warned us a couple of weeks ago that Stokes was not the Messiah, and he was not wrong.
If you had been watching England bat in Mumbai, Bangalore and here in Lucknow, and had never seen these cricketers perform before, you would have given short shrift to England’s No 4. Almost whoever was bowling seemed too good for him, and without large slices of luck he would never have got anything like as many as 43 against Sri Lanka.
But this duck against India — which spanned ten balls, all from Mohammed Shami — was almost entirely without redeeming feature. Stokes left his first ball, which was sensible, but then inexplicably charged at his second and missed. The next two balls he failed to lay bat on.
In Shami’s next over, the eighth of the innings, he was beaten twice more, punted one ball unconvincingly to mid-off and pushed two more deliveries to fielders patrolling the ring. He had no need to rush because England’s challenge was not to score fast — they needed less than 4½ runs an over at the start of the chase — but to keep wickets in hand. The bowling was very good, but conventional cricket would have done.
Advertisement
But Stokes, who has played many great innings in circumstances requiring him to blend attack and defence, was clearly finding the constraints under which Shami placed him intolerable. You could see it in his body-language: he was bristling to do something eye-catching, to impose himself on the game (as he had done momentarily during the India innings when he nearly ran out Rohit Sharma with a direct hit).
When an all-rounder is denied the chance to do one of the things he’s used to doing — in Stokes’s case, bowl — he tends to want to make the others count all the more.
To the final delivery of the over, Stokes stepped back to free his arms and launch a rustic swing that would have embarrassed a tail-ender, and heard his stumps splay. He did not toss his bat in the air as he had when he was caught off a leading edge against South Africa the previous weekend, as though he’d experienced a rare aberration, but trudged off with shoulders and head down in recognition of a wider defeat — beaten by the bowler, the game and personal ambition.
You had to wonder what Harry Brook thought as he looked on from the England dug-out — Brook the batsman this England side cannot find room for, Brook the batsman who has scored almost 2,000 runs in the 21 months since his international debut. “So they have left me out for that?”
Stokes came out of retirement for this tournament. He wanted another crack at a World Cup and England were never going to deny him, even when he said he would be unable to bowl. When he scored a half-century in his first game back and a record-breaking 182 in his third, he and they must have thought the plan had been granted divine blessing.
Advertisement
But Stokes’s fitness problems of the summer were not an illusion: his body is broken and needs repair. No sooner had he arrived in India than his hip presented him with a new problem. That it was his hip may have been unexpected, but the fact that some part of his body gave way ought to have surprised no one.
When he is up and running, Stokes is one of the most destructive batsmen on the planet. But he has always needed time to play himself in, as he did in his great innings at Headingley in 2019 and similarly at Lord’s and Headingley again last summer. His best periods of form with the bat have come when he approaches in measured fashion, taking care over the details. He could not appear further from that state now.
With the tournament gone, there is little point in Stokes playing further games. He was never going to play ODIs after this anyway. Brook should be given all three remaining games; he is the future and, as far as this format is concerned, Stokes the past. England and Stokes have to accept that the gamble to bring him back here — and it was a gamble given his physical condition — has not worked. It is time to move on.
Leaving out Stokes would be a big call but this is a cricketer who has been an automatic pick in all three formats since he was recalled after the World Cup of 2015. If he were to be pulled out now, it would neatly book-end a great period of English white-ball dominance, and signal that a fresh start was being made.
One question remains: should Stokes be involved in England’s defence of the T20 World Cup title next June? The 50-overs side has just been punished for players rocking up to major tournaments short of game-time together and the T20 team must not make the same mistake.
Advertisement
They have two chances to prepare, with a series in West Indies in December and at home to Pakistan in May. Stokes is probably going to be unavailable for West Indies to rest his knee, or have surgery on it, before the India Test tour. The answer looks self-evident, but it would still be a huge call for the selectors to make in respect of the most influential player in the English game.
