Before Ben Stokes went to bed in Hart’s Hotel in Nottingham city centre on Saturday night, he told Joe Root and Harry Brook – his predecessor as Test captain and, no doubt, his successor – of his plans to announce his retirement from international cricket the following day.
He had wanted to tell Brendon McCullum too, but England’s head coach was already asleep and, like the ECB’s communications team, would have to wait until the following morning to hear the news.
As McCullum – in the company of assistant coach Jeetan Patel and team operations manager Wayne Bentley – walked from Hart’s past Nottingham railway station and towards Trent Bridge on Sunday around 8.45am, closely followed by senior members of the comms team, they were embarking on a day like no other.
Not that the news came as a complete surprise to McCullum, who had been in daily contact with Stokes during his fortnight’s exile because of the now infamous trip to the Rex Rooms in west London after England’s 115-run victory at Lord’s.
In fact, Stokes’s mind had been made up ever since the last day of that first Test, when he was sitting next to Root in the dressing-room.
Joe Root shakes hands with Ben Stokes during the guard of honour at Trent Bridge on Sunday
To outsiders, that result looked like the start of the next phase for English cricket, a convincing riposte to the disappointment of the Ashes and the first step on the road to regaining the urn in 2027.
But Stokes had not been himself all week. Tetchy during the build-up to the game, when McCullum had dominated the airwaves and spoken at length about his relationship with his captain, Stokes found himself fighting off a ‘strange, interesting feeling’ ahead of the Test.
Yesterday, as he spoke on the outfield about his decision, he admitted he had taken time away to talk to ‘as many people as possible’ with experience of calling it a day, Stuart Broad among them. Was his feeling just a blip? Stokes concluded it was not.
‘Everyone I spoke to about the day it happens, saying “What’s it like?”, they just say it kicks you straight in the face,’ he said. ‘And I thought, a few weeks ago, that it did. As I was putting my pads on yesterday getting ready to go out there, that was the last nail in the coffin.’
Stokes’s disconnect with international cricket had been like Ernest Hemingway’s description of going bankrupt: gradual, then sudden. And it had been brewing since the Ashes, when England never got over the transformation of a winning position at lunch on the second day of the first Test at Perth into a shattering defeat by stumps.
He spent the next few months wrestling with the disappointment, telling his wife, Clare: ‘I don’t think I have any more fight left in me to get over this.’
Another fitness crisis didn’t help. Stokes had injured his groin during the final Test at Sydney, before his rehab was set back by a horrific accident in the Durham academy nets in February, when a ball broke his right cheekbone, leaving him grateful to be alive.
Stokes turned 35 on the first day of the Lord’s Test, and had almost nothing left to give. As he told his team-mates in the Trent Bridge dressing-room before the start of the fourth day: ‘I’ve had many trips to the well before for this team, for you blokes, for people beforehand, and I’ve got one more trip to do.’
Knowing what we do now, it seems clear that his post-midnight trip to the Rex Rooms with Gus Atkinson was not so much an act of rebellion as a gesture of release. It was not an up-yours to the ECB ‘suits’ of whom he had harboured suspicion ever since his disastrous night out in Bristol in 2017, but a symptom of the beginning of the end.
Needless to say, the ECB were unimpressed, and Stokes – back home in County Durham – briefly considered jacking it in there and then. For a while it was anyone’s guess what would happen next.
But his time away from the England set-up helped crystallise another aspect of the psychodrama. Playing for Durham against Northamptonshire in a County Championship game at Chester-le-Street, he batted with the freedom of old, charging the opening bowlers during a powerful innings of 95.
He described the experience of rejoining his county colleagues as ‘a new lease of life’ in terms of his ‘affection’ for the game. Tellingly, he added: ‘I just couldn’t get that same feeling back here [in Nottingham] this week, as much as I was trying.’
Stokes’s trip to play for his county Durham this month gave him a new lease of life – but he was unable to recapture that feeling of affection for the game when back on international duty
Stokes’s pre-match press conference at Trent Bridge had thrown up as many questions as answers. By now, his plans were in place, though his repeated insistence that he wasn’t thinking beyond the third Test was widely interpreted as a reluctance to create more headlines when England’s focus had to be on winning the series.
Behind the scenes, the ECB – though relieved his pronouncements hadn’t set fire to the entire edifice – were surprised he wasn’t pushed harder by journalists on the damage his behaviour had caused to the chances of a series victory, after a weakened team led by Root had been thrashed in the second Test at The Oval.
Stokes did admit he had apologised to his team-mates, but no contrition was offered to the ECB, who by now had lost the PR battle – not least because it had emerged that the details of the curfew imposed after the Ashes had not been properly conveyed to the players.
The possibility that this would be his last Test could not be ruled out, with friends of Stokes also taking the line that he was simply focusing on the Trent Bridge decider.
Even so, the previous evening, McCullum had cut a relaxed figure over dinner at Nottingham’s popular Memsaab curry house. Before the Oval Test, he had been sufficiently concerned about Stokes’s state of mind to say repeatedly he was ‘worried about Ben’. But he felt his captain was ready to go for the decider, and was clearly unaware of his precise plans.
The drama-to-come was also obscured by speculation about the future of both McCullum and Key, who was absent on the first morning of the game because he had travelled back to London for an MRI scan on a knee.
Stokes briefly considered quitting when he went back home to County Durham following the infamous night out in Chelsea
Both men had come under pressure for their admission that they had failed to prepare the team adequately in Australia, while Key had also faced scrutiny over the fine print of the curfew.
When the new national selector Marcus North was wheeled out to speak to Sky and the BBC on the second day of the Nottingham Test, rumours spread that he was being lined up to take Key’s job. The ECB denied this, saying the interviews had been pre-arranged, and Key returned to watch the next few days from the second floor of the Radcliffe Road Stand, accompanied by England Lions coach Andrew Flintoff.
McCullum, meanwhile, had done enough to convince his bosses that he remained the man for the job. Two relatively successful white-ball trips after the Ashes – to Sri Lanka and the T20 World Cup on the subcontinent – had persuaded officials that he had evolved.
Victory in the Lord’s Test seemed to confirm that, and it was generally agreed that the Oval defeat, caused in large part by wholesale changes after the nightclub saga, could not be held against him.
When ECB officials went AWOL for most of Sunday morning’s play, many wondered whether an announcement was in the offing. But no one foresaw precisely what.
In fact, plans were being drawn up with the help of Neil Fairbrother and Michael Lumb from Stokes’s management team for the moment New Zealand – who began the day on 120 for three in their second innings – had lost seven or eight wickets, at which point news of his retirement would be made public.
Stokes told them: ‘You guys just come up with a plan, and let me concentrate on what I need to do with the team.’
At 3.25pm, 15 minutes before tea, the news broke, leading to a standing ovation from spectators as it spread round the ground. Two minutes later, with characteristically dramatic timing, Stokes removed Zak Foulkes – New Zealand’s eighth wicket.
Stokes with wife Clare and son Leyton at Trent Bridge after play on Sunday
At tea, McCullum joked with Stokes that they should have made the announcement ‘an hour earlier’, adding: ‘We might have bowled them out by now.’ Team-mates, meanwhile, were agog at the atmosphere, describing it as ‘absolutely electric’.
Stokes then took the decision to open the batting in an attempt to score as many quick runs against the new ball before run-scoring became harder against the old one. It was a move interpreted by some as self-indulgent, and Stokes’s 20-ball 30 did not settle the argument one way or the other.
Later, with England now four down, and critics quibbling about the rights and wrongs of the choreography, Stokes was serenaded by chanting fans and hugged by Clare and their children, Layton and Libby.
It felt like a very human end to a turbulent few weeks and 15 impossibly action-packed years as an international cricketer. A kick in the face, sure – for his supporters as much as the man himself – but a much-needed pat on the back too.
