Roger Alton Roger Alton

Why Ben Stokes should win Sports Personality of the Year

Oh those lazy, hazy, Stokesy days of summer: how long ago they seem now. When England won the cricket World Cup — or scraped it anyway — in July, and pulled off the unlikeliest of Ashes Test wins on that blazing Leeds day in August, Ben Stokes loomed as a greater certainty to be the BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year than Vladimir Putin to win a Russian election.

Don’t think we can be so sure now — about Stokesy, that is. He’s odds-on favourite from the shortlist of six contenders for the award announced by the BBC this week, but it is his misfortune that by the time this silly old competition comes round each year, the cricketing heroics of the summer have gathered so much dust they have pretty much disappeared from view.

Instead the more immediate cricketing story is usually England doing badly in a Test match south of the equator: in this instance, at Mount Maunganui in New Zealand, where they suffered a thumping defeat at the hands of a Kiwi team whose industrious and pragmatic approach to Test cricket contrasted glaringly with the playboy recklessness of some of the touring players. England threw away their wickets as if they were engaged in a game of beach cricket — surely a consequence of their one-day successes. New Zealand, by contrast, showed a Stakhanovite commitment to the rigours of the five-day game. England’s two innings lasted just shy of 16 hours in total while B.J. Watling, the Kiwi keeper, batted for more than 11 hours in his one innings, let alone performing countless squats behind the stumps when his side were in the field.

Given that cricket hasn’t produced a Sports Personality winner (call it Spoty if you must, but is there a more hideous acronym in all the universe?) since Andrew Flintoff in 2005, I fear Stokesy may have to be content with being a legend in his own summertime.

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