“It’s a very simple question, and the answer could be yes or no. I could say yes glibly because I have no idea what’s going to happen the next two games.” - David Gower on who might win the Ashes.
TELFORD VICE in London
THREE slips, point, cover, mid-off, widish mid-on, short midwicket, short fine leg. The scores are level. The sun is high. The moment is nigh.
Joel Wilson is the furthest man from the bat, marooned on exile island at square leg.
Headingley is heady with hedonism. At least, with Yorkshire’s idea of the stuff.
Here comes Pat Cummins, angling with intent towards the crease. He fathers a wayward brat of a delivery: short, wide, veering wider still.
Two days earlier, presented with a wide half-volley by James Pattinson, Ben Stokes hacked wretchedly at a ball he could barely reach and splintered a catch to slip.
Not this time. Stokes, not the first time in exactly five-and-a-half hours at the wicket, finds his inner Zorro and produces a majestic slash that scolds and scalds the ball in equal measure and sends it screaming between point and cover.
Four runs. An unwinnable game won. The Ashes alive.
Stokes’ physical momentum keeps him moving forward. Then his mental momentum takes over and his right hand punches the sky. His bat, held in his left hand, starts to point upward to complete his roared salute to success, at the instant the man at point’s backside hits the ground in defeat.
That man is Nathan Lyon, who was also on his backside the over before — this time in the middle of the pitch and in disbelief at Wilson deciding that a delivery that would have hit the stumps had Stokes not put his pad in its path would, in the umpire’s opinion, not have hit the stumps.
By then, Australia had wasted their last referral, which, had they used it, would have ended the match in their favour. By then, Lyon had dropped the ball at the non-striker’s end with Jack Leach in the other hemisphere trying to scramble back, botching a runout that would have made Australia the winners. By then, Stokes was writing his own script.
There’s poetry in the point that the number on the back of Lyon’s shirt is 67 — the same amount of runs England were dismissed for in their first innings, when they seemed to have as much chance of winning as Donald Trump and Brexit’s Leave campaign.
But this is about Stokes, who joined Joe Root with 218 required and 12-and-a-half overs remaining on Saturday, and proceeded to not score off 48 of the 50 balls he faced before stumps. Then Root got out five-and-a-half overs into Sunday’s play, when Stokes had scored three singles off — here’s that number again — 67 deliveries.
Seven more balls would be bowled to Stokes before he made his first boundary, hammered through midwicket off Lyon. Poor bastard.
Stokes would hit 10 more. And eight sixes. And score an undefeated 135 to win it by one wicket.
So far, so superhuman. Part of what sets his innings apart is the humanity that shone out of photographs from the dressingroom that were posted on social media in the aftermath.
One shows Stokes, still padded up, sitting with his hips shoved forward, the apex of his curved spine slumped against the wall, and tugging his cap over his eyes trying to shut out the world.
In another, he sits glaring up at the camera like a slave from his oar deep in a Roman galley. The detritus of the day is scattered around him. Amid it, relegated to the floor, between his ankles, stands a bottle of the champagne he has won as the player of the match. Tellingly, it is unopened.
If you had seen these pictures without knowing Stokes had played the innings he had, and done what he had done for his team, you would have thought he had been part of the losing side. Winning isn’t everything, his expression says.
Outside the dressingroom the world is still giddy, and will remain so well into the next day.
“It’s not about how many runs [you score],” Graham Gooch tells the BBC. “It’s when your performance wins the game for your team. This performance is one of the greatest in English Test history.”
Gooch was there in July 1981 when another allrounder came to Headingley and stole victory from Australia.
Ian Botham will be remembered most for taking guard with England, who followed on in that match, 122 runs behind with five wickets down. He was 149 not out when they were dismissed with a lead of 129 — not enough to stop the Aussies from winning, of course. Brexit … Trump …
Bob Willis took 8/43, and Australia were dismissed for 111.
David Gower was also there, and, inevitably, was pressed to compare the two innings.
“This was better,” he said of Stokes’ effort. “The difference is that Ian’s innings in ’81 was born out of frustration and hope.
“It started as a bit of fun and it grew into something special; brilliant nonetheless. But Stokes’ whole innings has to be put in context. When he came to the crease on day three he battled out the last 35 minutes; hardly scored a run.
“At the start [of Sunday’s play], same thing: he knew there was a lot riding on the day. When he saw Joe Root go quickly his shoulders were big enough to bear the burden.”
For Gower, Stokes’ innings was “a beautifully constructed thing, a thing of beauty”. Leach, who entered, stage left with England nine down and still needing 73, was “a budding cult hero”, and the matchwinning stand was “impossible”.
So, David, can England win the Ashes?
“It’s a very simple question, and the answer could be yes or no. I could say yes glibly because I have no idea what’s going to happen the next two games.”
Gower speaks English with the same clean, elegant lines he brought to the beautiful business of left-handed batting. Maybe that’s why his contract with Sky will not be renewed after the Ashes.
Commentary has become about shooting quantity first and asking questions about quality later. Here, for instance, is Alastair Cook in the afterglow of Sunday’s spectacle: “That’s the most extraordinary innings ever, ever played by an Englishman.”
How would Cook know, considering he wasn’t alive for the first 608 of England’s 1 014 Tests? And we cannot leave unquestioned the assertion that Stokes is an Englishman considering he spent the first 12 of his 28 years in New Zealand.
Good thing Geoffrey Boycott qualified his social media post: “I’ve seen some remarkable cricket moments in my life but that is the best I’ve seen in over 50 years.”
Boycott wasn’t at Kingsmead in February, so he cannot be beaten with the same stick rightfully being taken to the too many people wondering whether Stokes’ innings is the best yet seen without considering Kusal Perera’s claim to that title.
Perera made an undefeated 153 to help earn Sri Lanka the honour of becoming the first Asian team to win a series in South Africa.
At least Stokes scored runs for England legitimately this time, unlike in the World Cup final against his native country at Lord’s in July — when a crucial run was erroneously awarded in the confusion of the ball skewing off the back of his bat and going for four as he dived to make his ground.
If Stokes is hardly English, England’s star bowler, Barbados born and raised Jofra Archer, who played his first game in the country in April 2014, is not even close.
The dust has hardly settled on long, winding, racially charged arguments that changing the rules to lever Archer into the selection frame — before him the qualification period for foreigners was seven years, now it’s three — “wouldn’t be fair, morally”, as Chris Woakes said.
You won’t hear that kind of talk now that Archer is concussing opposition batters for a living. It seems he has also hit the nation on the head and caused collective amnesia.
The truth of it is that Stokes and Archer are fine players, and that it’s good for themselves and the game that they are proving as much.
Another truth is that Leach, whose only run in the hour he batted for on Sunday tied the scores, is a walking metaphor for the Englishness of England’s team. “He’s probably not going to make a career as a cricketer on Love Island,” was how cricket writer Matthew Engel described Somerset’s own bespectacled slow left-armer on the Beeb on Monday.
Leach spent more time removing his helmet and cleaning his glasses on Sunday than he did actually doing the hard work of batting — which he left to the foreign-born hired help at the other end.
Colonialism, then, is not dead. More happily, neither is the Ashes.
First published by Times SELECT.
nice