England cricket fans rejoiced on Monday at the news that few saw coming. It was not their side’s comprehensive victory over reigning T20 World Champions West Indies at the weekend that had champagne corks popping and hope for a renaissance after a less than impressive summer coursing through the veins of the Barmy Army. Rather, it was the announcement that their talisman and Ginger General, Ben Stokes, had been added to the Ashes squad to tour Australia next month.
Stokes had been sidelined for the vast majority of the 2021 season with a badly broken finger, sustained while playing for the Rajasthan Royals in the IPL last April. He had stepped into the breach as captain of England’s limited overs team in July after a Covid outbreak forced the original 18-man squad to isolate, but his finger wasn’t right. Nor was his mental health. He announced that he would take an indefinite break from the game. Then he sent a tweet on 18th October showing him back in the indoor nets. He could hold his bat properly for the first time since April. A second operation had been a success, but still it was surely too much to hope that he would make it to Australia. But, much to England’s relief, salvation is at hand.
To understand why Stokes is so important to English Test cricket you need not to fixate too heavily on his statistics. It’s true that his average of 37.04 with the bat is the second highest in the squad, but this says more about the dearth of effective batting at England’s disposal. His bowling average of 31.38 is worse than four men (Anderson, Broad, Robinson and Leach) who will probably start the series in Brisbane. He’s a taker of spectacular catches but actually drops more than his colleagues in the slips.
Furthermore, his most recent fabled intervention in Test cricket, at Headingley in 2019 when he single-handedly won a match from a seemingly impossible position, did not result in an Ashes victory for England. They lost the next match, drew the series and Australia retained the urn.
The value of Stokes is, instead, found in how he balances team selection and the belief he instils in his team mates. Having made his debut in Australia back in 2013 he was the one shining light in an otherwise wretched campaign that saw an aging team completely outplayed. He missed the last Ashes tour and the team again folded meekly. Before his inclusion in this squad, pessimism at England’s prospects was shared universally by fans and pundits alike.
On the mostly batting-friendly surfaces of Australia, where bowlers will have heavy workloads, England desperately want to field four front line seamers and their best spinner, Jack Leach. Of those four seamers, Anderson and Broad are in the twilight of their careers and will struggle to maintain peak performance with the five Test matches being played over just six weeks. They will need to be rotated at some point. Mark Wood, England’s fastest bowler, finds it difficult to play back-to-back matches, so he too will need rest. As Australia discovered to their cost against India earlier this year, picking the same quartet of bowlers for every match results in series-losing fatigue.
With Stokes as the fourth seamer, England can now rotate their quicker bowlers. Furthermore, they now have experience and effectiveness with the bat in the lower middle order. Suddenly the whole team composition has a stability that was sorely lacking in the defeats to New Zealand and India last summer.
Stokes has the opportunity to drag an unfancied side over the line, much as Ian Botham did in 1986/87 when a squad that Martin Johnson famously described as having only three failings – ‘they can’t bat, they can’t bowl and they can’t field’ – surprised everyone by winning 2-1. Botham was in a slow and steady decline in 1986. Stokes, finger injuries aside, is far fitter and altogether more consistent with both bat and ball.
It is a regular failing of English sport to search for salvation in the figure of one man. Football, for example, fixated over the fitness of Beckham and Rooney in days gone by. In Stokes, however, English cricket has a genuine game changer, and maybe, just maybe, a genuine chance.
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