There are things that annoyed me yesterday, that I won’t care about tomorrow.
The finale of Ben Stokes’ retirement was fantastical, and at times farcical. In the moments when you let your inner cynic win, Stokes’ main-character mantra can grate. The ninth over of a spell begins in 30 degree heat and you realise that ah, yes, Ben’s putting on his show again. Everyone look at Ben. The man who prides himself on going to the well, even if a tap’s right there.
The timing of his retirement was arranged so that the news would break when New Zealand were seven or eight wickets down in their innings, with the plan for Stokes to open the batting already in place. So Stokes retires and the crowd goes sad. Then Stokes opens the batting and the crowd goes happy. Simple.
‘Who writes his scripts?’, is always the question attached to the eternal miracle maker. And as it turns out, it’s a combination of his management team, Michael Lumb and Neil Fairbrother, and England’s communications department. How romantic.
But what actually happened next you couldn’t script. As Trent Bridge rose to applaud Stokes, who was at the top of his mark and about to start the eleventh over of his spell (everyone look at Ben), he ran in, forced an edge from Zak Foulkes and set off on a celebration lap of the ages. It was magic.
“That is the most Ben Stokes thing you will ever see,” shouted BBC commentator and former England bowler Steve Finn on the highlights package. And he was right.
The 15 overs in the evening when chaos reigned supreme will be remembered forever. They were 15 overs that saw 100 English runs scored and four English wickets fall. Stokes himself got 30 off 20. He ran at his first ball and attempted a reverse sweep off his second. Sky pundits who were off air crammed forward in shock at what he was doing and personal WhatsApp messages started rolling in. “This is disgraceful,” read one. “This is a joke,” read another. Stokes had seen the iceberg on the horizon, and turned into it with a smile.
The alternative opinion is that this was poetry. One final throw of the dice and one final outing for Stokes’ team in the image he created. Regardless of the result, the three hours following the announcement of his retirement until the close of play was unmissable, as a packed house got to see that man, doing that thing, one more time. I’ll remember it forever and consider myself lucky to have been there. And maybe that’s enough. Whatever life without Stokes will end up looking like, it will be less.
“You can hold two thoughts at once,” said Mark Butcher on the Wisden Cricket Weekly podcast at the conclusion of the match. “You can be very sad that you will never get to see Ben Stokes play again. You can be very happy that you got the chance to see a player who could do the type of things that he could do to win matches single handedly, to reverse inevitable tides in his favour. And you can be watching a Test match that is very important for England, and go, you’ve flushed it down the toilet.”
When Harry Brook flipped a ball to fine leg where he was caught for 21 off 9 balls late on day four, New Zealand wicketkeeper Tom Blundell burst out laughing. A second player ran past the stumps where the microphone picked him up hysterically repeating, “What are they doing!? What are they doing!?”
New Zealand will have been delighted to have beaten the circus on the other side of the aisle. They’ve arrived, they’ve done their job, and they can head off on their next adventure.
Stokes has thrown his weight behind Brook as the next captain, saying “If I was to be asked who I think should do it, I would be throwing my 100 percent support behind Harry Brook.”
Brook’s Wellington nightclub past means he carries baggage were he to take the role, not to mention his duties with the white ball, overseeing all three formats appears a daunting task. But unless Joe Root fancies a temporary gig, he’s the only feasible option. Stokes may be gone, but the turbulence won’t leave with him. A team that has two wins in ten isn’t solved overnight.
Between Stokes, Rob Key and Brendon McCullum, something has clearly been off since the Ashes. Things just didn’t feel right.
The result is where we are now. And on the one hand, we’ll never know what really happened between the three of them. But on the other hand, it feels like it has largely played out in plain sight.
Ahead of the New Zealand series, Stokes spoke of the struggles he’d had after Australia, that the defeat had taken him to places he thought he’d been to before but hadn’t. He had had a horrific facial injury after being struck by a ball in the nets.
At Lord’s it was widely commented on that he didn’t seem himself. He then dumped himself into a media storm and professional controversy that concluded with him missing a match, and then upon his return he said he was focusing only on the week of Trent Bridge ahead, and no further. Then, true to his implication, he retired.
Reading it back and there are no lines to read between. Only the script that was always presented. The man who had given it his all, concluded that was enough.
“I don’t think I have any fight left in me,” were the words he told his wife.
For 15 years, Ben Stokes was the centre of attention for a reason. Because all of it, from beginning to end, was a hell of a show.
