Cricket won’t be the same without Ben Stokes

Ben Stokes, the mesmerising captain of England’s test cricket side and one of the best players of his generation, has retired. The news was announced to a shocked crowd at Trent Bridge, Nottingham, on the fourth day of England’s test match against New Zealand.

Stokes’s retirement will be a significant blow to the English side, which, with the exception of Joe Root, has in recent years developed an unhealthy reliance on its captain to win matches. But the real loss is to cricket. Stokes was one of those rare players, like Shane Warne or Virat Kohli, whose mere presence on the field elevated the game. The sheer length of a test match means that much of it is passively absorbed. But that wasn’t possible when Stokes was batting or bowling – something was always going to happen when he was on the field, the match always seemed to hinge on his success or failure. You had to watch.

That Stokes possessed this intangible quality wasn’t only down to his brilliance as a player. It could be argued that Root, or Australians Pat Cummins and Steve Smith, sit above Stokes in the pantheon of modern greats. But none of them possesses Stokes’s aura or his magnetism. His passion, his sheer will to win, his grit.

Stokes’s career will forever be marked by his unbeaten century at Headingley in 2019, when these traits were demonstrated to an almost superhuman degree. It was the third test of the Ashes. England, already one-nil down, were staring down the barrel of certain defeat. They needed 72 runs to reach a record 379 when England lost their penultimate wicket, and Stokes was joined at the crease by Jack Leach – a spin bowler with a test batting average of below 10.

Stokes proceeded to play what is widely regarded as the most remarkable innings in test history. He hogged the strike from Leach, an inept batsman who would have been unable to withstand Australia’s attack for any meaningful period of time. This was a vulnerability Stokes was all too aware of – sooner or later, Leach would let him down, and he needed to chase the runs quickly if his side was to have any chance at all. He abandoned any caution and treated Australia’s famous bowling attack with contempt, clubbing his final 84 runs from just 67 deliveries.

It all happened with a drama that only Stokes seemed capable of creating. Australia, responding to his attack, ringed the outfield in an attempt to coax him off strike – or to bet that one of his disrespectfully audacious shots would fall short and into the hands of an Australian player. Yet every time Stokes cleared the boundary fence. Leach, with only a few runs to spare, should have been run out, but Australia’s Nathan Lyon fumbled the ball. Stokes himself should have been dismissed leg before wicket with just two runs to win, but Australia were unable to challenge the umpire’s decision, having exhausted their two reviews. And Stokes, the weight of England on his shoulders and the fate of the Ashes in his hands, dragged England to the most extraordinary and unlikely of victories.

Stokes seemed to attract as much attention for what he did off the field as he did on it. He was a heavy drinker, and in 2017 was charged with affray over a nightclub brawl in Bristol (Stokes said he was standing up for a homosexual couple, and was later acquitted). In 2021, he took an ‘indefinite break’ from cricket, citing his mental health. No matter what he did away from the game, drama always seemed to stalk him, just as it did on the field.

Which leads us to the strange events of the recent weeks. At the beginning of the month, after defeating New Zealand at Lords in the first test of the current series, Stokes and his team celebrated at a nightclub in Chelsea. At some point, a fight broke out with a player from the Saracens rugby club involving fellow England player Gus Atkinson. Stokes and Atkinson were banned from the second test against New Zealand, and Stokes – despite appearing to play no role in the altercation – was forced to make a humiliating public apology.

This appears to have been the last straw for Stokes, whose relationship with the team’s coach, Brendan McCullum, and the leadership of the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) has been strained ever since 2017. Back then, despite being cleared of the charges and publicly supported by the couple Stokes said he had been defending, the ECB fined him £30,000 and imposed a ban of eight matches. Stokes felt as though he had been thrown under the bus, as he appeared to have been again earlier this month.

Already, the ECB and McCullum have come in for searing criticism. And deservedly so. The most recent Ashes series in Australia exposed the ECB as managerialist, incompetent and overly sensitive to criticism. McCullum seemed to be someone who refused to hear any criticism at all. Worse still, both McCullum and the ECB appeared to have failed to stand up for Stokes.

One of the most disappointing consequences of Stokes’s retirement is how much less interesting next summer’s Ashes have now become. The public surely deserved one final showdown between four greats of test cricket – Australia’s Cummins and Smith against Root and Stokes.

Perhaps a more pressing matter for England is that the sides’ chances of winning the series appeared to have vanished with Stokes’s retirement. For all the theatre, he leaves with an extraordinary record – only the second man after the great South African, Jacques Kallis, to have taken more than 250 wickets and scored more than 7,000 runs. Stokes leaves a gaping hole that England’s increasingly thin, mediocre pool of emerging test players will not fill.

This was not the way Ben Stokes was supposed to bow out of the game. Perhaps selfishly, the sporting public feels it deserved one more summer from this most authentic, heart-and-soul of cricketers. In any event, cricket just got far less interesting.

Hugo Timms is a staff writer at spiked.