Section:GDN 1N PaGe:42 Edition Date:190827 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 26/8/2019 20:13 cYanmaGentaYellowb
- The Guardian Tuesday 27 August 2019
(^42) Sport
Cricket The Ashes
Andy Bull
If I’d been at the Waca in 1975 when
Roy Fredericks thrashed 169 off
Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson, or
Headingley in 1991 when Graham
Gooch made 154 against the West
Indian quicks, or Bridgetown in 1999
when Brian Lara made 153 out of 311
and beat Australia single-handedly,
one wicket left in the fourth innings,
then maybe I’d feel diff erently. But
yes, Stokes’s 135 probably is the
greatest, and certainly the most
preposterously improbable and
wonderfully entertaining, innings
I’ve ever seen live, ahead of Kevin
Pietersen’s century at the Oval on
the last day of 2005 series.
Ali Martin
Recency bias once saw Robbie
Williams come sixth in a poll
to decide the most infl uential
musicians of the last millennium
- one place above Mozart – so we
should be wary of getting carried
away. But given the shot played in
England’s fi rst innings meltdown,
the 24 overs of toil/atonement with
the ball that followed, the spadework
put in second time around and yet
the destiny of the Ashes looking
settled when Jack Leach came to
the crease, I’m struggling to think
of a rival I have watched live. Kusal
Perera against South Africa this year - which I didn’t – must come close.
Was it the
greatest Test
innings you
have seen?
Emma John
As someone who has not only failed
to sit through all 2,35 8 Tests, but
who was on an inconveniently
delayed fl ight during Stokes’s
fi rework fi nale, I wouldn’t dare
make such a claim. But few Test
innings have managed to span both
the sheer stolidity of Atherton’s 185
not out in Johannesburg and the
matchwinning biff of Botham’s 149
not out in 1981 while throwing in
a switch-hitting dash of KP’s 2005
vintage. Combine that with the fact
it was a lot more gripping to watch
than any of Lara or Tendulkar’s epics- and unlike Bradman, it was in full
colour – and I’m sold.
Geoff Lemon
The Stokes innings felt totally
diff erent to great hundreds I’ve
seen. It was a modern beast, crossing
Test match patience with the
creative strokeplay and sustained
aggression of T20. And it has a
modern partner, in Kusal Perera’s
unbeaten 153 to beat South Africa
last February. Both were chasing
over 300. Perera needed 78 for
the last wicket, Stokes needed 74.
Perera hit fi ve sixes in the closing
stages, Stokes hit eight overall.
But both were astonishing. There’s
no meaningful way to say that
something is the best. You can say
that nothing else could be better.Once troubled
hero now has
a summer he
will always own
His career obituary was
being written in 2017 but
Ben Stokes has grown into
the best version of himselfT
he messiest corner of
any sports writer’s life
is their waste-paper
bin. A lot of the time
print deadlines are so
tight that most of the
writing is done live while the match
happens, and since sport has an
unfortunate way of throwing up all
those late twists you end up, often
as not, throwing half of it away.
This is the stuff that does not
even get to be the next day’s fi sh and
chip paper, intros undone by late
winners, articles discarded because
of last-wicket partnerships, rough
fi rst drafts of the history that almost
was. This summer, there have been
an awful lot of screwed-up pages
wasted on what England did before
Ben Stokes had fi nished.
There were the “where did it all go
wrong?” pieces we started out on at
Lord’s when England were midway
through the back half of the World
Cup fi nal, 86 for four after 24 overs
and 155 runs away from where they
needed to be.
And the “what now?” articles
we began half an hour after lunch
at Headingley on Sunday, when
England had only three wickets
left to save the Ashes. All the post-
mortems we had to abandon when
the corpse magically sprang back to
life and started walloping sixes all
over. If Stokes had made just one
wrong decision, played just one rash
shot, in either of those two innings,
then the future of English cricket
would be very diff erent.
There is more, from back beforeAndy Bullall that. In the scrap folder of my
laptop I have a copy of Stokes’s
career obituary, written in the
winter of 2017 when he had been
banned from playing for England
and was awaiting trial on a charge
of aff ray after a fi ght outside a
nightclub in Bristol.
Like a lot of writers, I had one
ready in case he was found guilty.
Mine started with an anecdote fromhis autobiography, Firestarter. It
was from December 2015, right after
England’s short tour of Sri Lanka.
He had barely made a run all winter
and was so dejected that when he got
home to his family he turned around
and went right back out again to go
and play drinking games with three
of his teammates. It’s what happened
next that made the story seem
worth repeating. He “red-carded
himself ”, went home at half one in
the morning, got into the shower and
then broke down in tears.
“All my emotions came pouring
out,” he says. “I was completely
gone.” He does not dwell on it long.
On the very next page he asks his▲ The moment
of glory for
Ben Stokes at
Headingley
ANTHONY DEVLIN/
AFP/GETTY IMAGES Stokes played
a pivotal role in
England’s World
Cup glory
TOM JENKINS/
THE GUARDIANOur writers give their verdict
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