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 final match for England. Not at the end of a series, neatly wrapped in a guard of honour 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 had already gone.I have spent a fair portion of my adult life being told that Test cricket is dying, that five-day cricket is a colonial relic awaiting the attention economy’s euthanasia. And then along came a left-hander born in Christchurch and raised in Cumbria, who decided, almost single-handedly and certainly single-mindedly, that the patient would not be going quietly. They called it Bazball, after the coach, because the English have always preferred naming their revolutions after someone safely Antipodean. Yet it was Stokes who batted as though the scorecard were a personal insult, who declared when sensible men would have settled for survival, and who transformed dead rubbers and lost causes into the only kind of cricket that seemed to interest him.There is Headingley in 2019, of course, because there always is. England had been bowled out for 67 in the first innings, were chasing 359, had stumbled to 286 for 9, and possessed only Jack Leach, whose contribution amounted to the cricketing equivalent of moral support. What followed was less an innings than an argument with probability itself. Stokes won because, somehow, Stokes usually did. Leach’s solitary run has become one of the most celebrated singles in cricket history, while at the other end a man appeared determined to convince mathematics that it had overestimated its authority.
The numbers, impressive though they are, have always felt slightly inadequate. More than 7,200 Test runs, over 240 wickets before this final match concludes, fourteen Test centuries, and a batting average that critics continue to wave about as though it settles an argument. It settles nothing. Stokes was never a man of averages. He belonged to moments, and moments have an inconvenient habit of resisting arithmetic. The 258 at Cape Town, the fastest Test 250 ever scored, tells you more about him than any spreadsheet could. The mean is for actuaries. Stokes dealt in extremes, in tamasha, in the improbable stories grandparents tell children who politely pretend they have never heard them before.
What I keep returning to, however, is that the first half of his career looked nothing like a hagiography. There was Bristol, the brawl, the arrest, the missed Ashes, the vice-captaincy stripped away, and a reputation that appeared beyond repair. There was Carlos Brathwaite in Kolkata, dispatching four consecutive deliveries into the stands and, with them, every comforting assumption that sporting redemption follows a straight line. For a while, Stokes became English cricket’s cautionary tale.That he rebuilt himself into its conscience is, perhaps, the greater achievement. He spoke openly about mental health when elite sport still regarded vulnerability as an administrative error. He stepped away from the game indefinitely and, in doing so, quietly permitted others to do the same. He captained with a body that often appeared held together by surgery, stubbornness and faith in roughly equal measure. Those are the innings the highlight reels seldom replay.And so he leaves, not at the end of the series, where convention would have preferred him, but in the middle of a Test match, with tea approaching and the result unresolved. It is the most Ben Stokes ending imaginable. For more than a decade, he played as though probability were merely another opponent to be worn down. Now he has chosen to announce the ending before the match itself has one.Khuda hafiz, Ben.The fourth innings will always have scoreboards and statistics. It may take rather longer before it finds another man willing to treat both as mere suggestions.
