So acute is the agitation over Ben Stokes’s fitness that even the sight of him breaking into a light trot at Chester-le-Street this week has acquired state-of-the-nation significance. Might it mean he lasts all five Tests against India this summer? Could England dare to dream of a first away triumph in an Ashes for 15 years? The Test captain’s condition is painfully precarious: he has reached the stage where he is only one misjudged run-up away from a potentially career-ending setback. How absurd, then, that in the midst of this delicate management of his battered body, he is being sized up to carry the extra baggage of leading the country’s sclerotic one-day team.
It is testament to Stokes’s transformative qualities as a motivator that he is even a contender, in his compromised state, for this complex dual role. Still, the idea is staggeringly self-defeating, jeopardising not just his longevity but also England’s prospects in Australia this winter, the ultimate litmus test of the Bazball era. Stokes is patched together with sticky tape as it is, describing himself as the “bionic man” to illustrate how much punishment his left hamstring has taken. In the circumstances, the suggestion that he should shoulder captaincy duties in a second format seems counter-intuitive at best. At worst, it is a reckless act of desperation.
Stokes could hardly have offered a blunter rationale for forsaking the one-day game in 2022. He was feeling broken, he explained, by the remorselessness of the schedule, incapable of producing his maximum effort in 50-over mode any longer. “The England shirt deserves nothing less from anyone who wears it,” he said. The war wounds have only multiplied since, with damage to his knees, toe, hip and hamstring. No sooner did he emerge from self-enforced retirement at the 2023 World Cup that he heard his hip make a popping noise during a warm-up in Guwahati. “I thought I was done,” he reflected. While he escaped any major trauma, the scare reminded him of the dangers of spreading himself too thinly.
So why countenance those risks now? Why, at this pivotal juncture in re-imagining how Test cricket can be played, are England even entertaining the notion of wearing their talisman down with extraneous labour? It is a moot point as to whether Stokes will even make it to Perth in November on his existing workload. Never mind the spirit being willing but the flesh weak, his problem is that his sheer defiance can leave him physically wrecked. Full of snarling intent in New Zealand last December, he aborted a bowling spell in the first Test in Christchurch, alarmed by a twinge in his back. Not that he was prepared, even when his hamstring gave way in Hamilton, to tolerate compromises. ...
