Only one other side has taken all 60 wickets in a three-Test series in Pakistan –and Sri Lanka had Muttiah MuralitharanWhen cricket lovers discuss this new England, they rave about the batting. So fearless! Five an over! All day long! Sometimes even seven! And everybody at it (except Ben Foakes, the designated driver). If fast scoring was all Ben Stokes and Brendon McCullum had brought us, it would be quite something. But they would not have won nine Tests out of 10.The second most exciting thing about this new era, and perhaps the most significant, is that England keep bowling their opponents out. Whether they’re facing New Zealand, India, South Africa or Pakistan, every time Stokes’s England take the field,...
All-rounder brought back memories of 2019 with his ability to produce his very best when under the most severe pressureIt was Joe Root who probably best summed up Ben Stokes and a career that will for ever be defined by far more than just the numbers. Speaking in Phoenix from the Ashes, the documentary about the life and times of England’s champion all-rounder, Root put it simply: “The big moments find him.”One certainly found Stokes at Eden Gardens six years ago, the last time he played a world final decked out in red. That fateful deciding over he bowled to Carlos Brathwaite saw four successive sixes soar into the night sky like fireworks, West Indies were crowned T20 world champions...
All-rounder has never truly shone in the shortest form but his personality and vibes could be crucial for such a tournamentShut your eyes and it’s not hard to picture the enduring images of Ben Stokes’s England career. In Test cricket he’s almost certainly leaning back, arms in the air at Headingley, roaring after he’s just cut away, cut away for four. In ODIs he’s probably decked out in baby/powder blue, arms aloft once again but this time with innocent eyes. Martin Guptill’s throw has deflected off Stokes’s bat for the six that no one saw coming. Not long afterwards, Stokes will have the World Cup trophy in his hands.In the shortest form, however, the image is a painful one. It’s...
Captain leads by example with the ball and field placings but some of his batting has not been up to his high standardsAs I look back over a summer when Ben Stokes has inspired an extraordinary turnaround of England’s fortunes in Test cricket, I keep returning to a more distant memory. It was 2013, and Stokes and I were in Australia, his first England Lions tour as a player and my first as batting coach. He was sent home after coming back very late one evening or, more accurately, early one morning.David Parsons, the England and Wales Cricket Board’s performance director, and the first-team coach, Andy Flower, happened to be over at the time and sat in on the disciplinary...
On a vintage Test-match day, the England captain bent the occasion to his will in heartwarming and engrossing fashionThere are still some unchanging certainties in the English cricketing summer; many of which were on show on a humid, bellicose second day of this second Test.Specialist wicketkeepers are busy at the crease, all bottom-handed crunch and ferrety shovels. Anything with the name Strauss attached to it will be accepted as objective, unchallenged gospel (call it The Strauss Hundred and we’d never have heard a whimper). Old Trafford will continue to remake the world as a series of red glass boxes, the compulsory template for any licenced Manchester architect. Perhaps the eastern stand, currently flattened, might bring something new. We might get...