Ben Stokes, hero of the new miracle of Headingley
The Oval, 1902. Headingley 1981. Melbourne 1982. Edgbaston 2005. And now Headingley 2019. Move over Sir Ian Botham, you’ve got company and there’s a new king in the north. This astonishing, heart-stopping, game will forever be remembered as Stokes’s match and recalled for as long as test cricket is still played and savoured. For a game perpetually teetering on the edge of crisis, cricket’s in pretty good shape when it comes at you like this. Ben Stokes has now, as everyone agrees, played two once-in-a-lifetime innings in six weeks. The World Cup final was one thing; this was improbability on an altogether different, still more elevated, level. England’s final pair,