There is a particular cruelty 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 game for England. Not at the end of the series, neatly wrapped up in a guard of honor and an orchestral montage, but halfway through the story, the way he seemed to play most of his cricket. Ek lamha ruk jao — wait a moment — and the moment has already passed.I’ve spent a good part of my adult life being told that Test cricket is dying, that five-day cricket is a colonial remnant awaiting the euthanasia of the attention economy. And then along came a Christchurch-born, Cumbria-bred left-hander who decided, almost single-handedly and certainly single-mindedly, that the patient was not going to go quietly. They called it Bazball, after the coach, because the English always preferred to name their revolutions after some safe Antipodes. And yet it was Stokes who batted as if the scoreboard was a personal affront, who announced when sensitive people would settle for survival and who turned dead benches and lost causes into the only kind of cricket he seemed to care about.There’s Headingley in 2019, of course, because there always is. England were bowled out for 67 in the first innings, chasing 359, slumping to 286 for 9, with only Jack Leach, whose contribution was the cricketing equivalent of moral support. What followed was less of an amendment than an argument with probability itself. Stokes won because, somehow, Stokes usually won. Leach’s solo run became one of the most celebrated individual runs in cricket history, while at the other end emerged a man determined to convince mathematics that it had overestimated its authority.
The numbers, while impressive, always felt a bit lacking. More than 7,200 Test runs, over 240 wickets before the end of this last match, fourteen Test centuries and a batting average that critics continue to wave as if it settles the argument. It doesn’t solve anything. Stokes was never an average man. It belonged to moments, and moments have a nasty habit of resisting arithmetic. 258 in Cape Town, the fastest Test 250 ever achieved, tells you more about him than any spreadsheet. It means for actuaries. Stokes deals in extremes, in tamasha, in the incredible stories grandparents tell to children who politely pretend they’ve never heard them before.
However, what I keep coming back to is that the first half of his career felt nothing like hagiography. There was Bristol, a brawl, an arrest, a missed Ashes, stripped of the vice-captaincy title and a reputation that seemed beyond repair. There was Carlos Brathwaite in Kolkata, sending four successive deliveries into the stands and, with them, any comforting assumption that sporting redemption was following a straight line. For a while, Stokes became a cautionary tale for English cricket.That he reintegrated himself into his conscience is perhaps the greater achievement. He spoke openly about mental health at a time when elite sport still saw vulnerability as an administrative error. He walked away from the game indefinitely and, in doing so, quietly allowed others to do the same. He was a captain with a body that often seemed held together by surgery, stubbornness and faith in about equal measure. These are changes that featured rollers rarely repeat.And so he leaves, not at the end of the series, where convention would prefer, but in the middle of a Test match, with a close tea and a draw. It’s the most Ben Stokes ending imaginable. For more than a decade, he played as if he was probably just another opponent to wear down. Now he decided to announce the end before the match itself has it.Khuda Hafiz, Ben.The fourth inning will always have scoreboards and statistics. It may be a long time before she finds another man who is willing to treat both of them as mere propositions.
