The Times - UK - 04.12.2021

16 2GS Saturday December 4 2021 | the times

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Play as you urn: Stokes enjoys the moment of England’s Ashes victory on the Oval outfield in 2015 with his son Layton

BEN RADFORD/GETTY IMAGES

Hutton as chairman, Mark Arthur as

chief executive and two other board

members. It was then confirmed yester-

day that their entire coaching staff,

which also included Paul Grayson, the

batting coach, and Richard Pyrah, the

bowling coach, and medical teams, had

been removed.

Yorkshire are in a dire financial situa-

tion, having lost the majority of their

sponsors and are suspended from host-

ing international matches. The new

board of directors believes that it is only

by clearing out the staff who were

employed during the time of the investi-

gation into institutional racism, that

they will be able to begin the process of

trying to persuade sponsors to return.

The cull could pave the way for York-

shire to demonstrate to the ECB that

I

t wasn’t an unguarded moment,

because the interview was on the

record and it was taking place

during the morning (Australia

time), but I was pleasantly

surprised by the candour of Australia’s

head coach, Justin Langer, when we

spoke last November, 12 months

before the Ashes. In particular, I had

to rewind the tape recorder and listen

again when he said: “Would I have

Ben Stokes in my team? He’d be the

first person I’d have in my team, any

day of the week.”

Langer had been recounting an

anecdote from the Oval dressing

room after the conclusion of the 2019

Ashes. Beers had been taken; players

from both sides were mingling,

swapping stories after a competitive,

nip-and-tuck series.

After a few more beers, Langer had

picked up a stray baggy green cap,

plonked it on Stokes’s head, picked

the all-rounder up over his shoulder

and carried him out of the room.

Wouldn’t mind having him in my side,

he was saying.

This is rare praise from an

Australian cricketer. Langer was

saying, in essence, that they see

Stokes as one of them. A winner. A

competitor who never knows when

he is beaten. A hard bastard.

Memories were still fresh from the

miracle at Headingley when Langer

performed his stunt at the Oval, but

the power and aura of performances

such as that don’t fade. They have a

profound effect on the opposition —

as well as on those alongside.

No one could have predicted the

trajectory of Stokes’s career after that

interview with Langer.

He has played just four Tests since

then, a handful of ODIs and some

T20 and Hundred engagements, after

which, in July, through a combination

of grief, Covid-induced schedule

fatigue, a bad finger break and

general exhaustion, he took an

indefinite break from the game to

focus on his mental health.

It was after a match against Trent

Rockets that the realisation dawned

that even this strongest of cricketers

and hardest of men needed a break.

And it was only in October, after a

second operation on the finger he had

damaged at the start of the Indian

Premier League, that the juices began

to flow again. The pain disappeared

and he began to think of a return to

action.

We cannot really guess how things

will go after such a lay-off,

uncertainty that is heightened by

England’s interrupted preparation in

Queensland. Steve James wrote an

excellent piece in these pages recently

touching on Stokes’s cricketing

pedigree and the importance he

brings to the balance of the team, but

I’d like to emphasise the psychological

impact of his return, which should

not be underestimated.

Sometimes, we forget how

important this is. The game is highly

data-driven these days, and players

are prepared in far greater detail than

they ever were. Stock markets are said

to be efficient and those who work in

the background with cricketers

imagine sport could be like that, too.

Stokes is like

Botham – you

walk taller in

his presence

Mike Atherton says

psychological impact

of all-rounder’s return is

as important

as his ability

to transform

matches

CONTINUED FROM FRONT

Ronnie O’Sullivan’s hopes of an eighth

UK Championship title were dashed

last night amid a series of sit-down

protests over crowd noise. Agitated

from the start of his quarter-final,

O’Sullivan was beaten in a 6-5 thriller

by Kyren Wilson, the world No 5, at the

York Barbican.

For Wilson it was revenge for his

defeat in the 2020 World Champion-

ship final. But on multiple occasions an

irritated O’Sullivan sat down in his

chair mid-break because of crowd

interruptions as fans watching the

they have put in place sufficient

changes to be able to keep their inter-

national matches next year. They

would also hope that being stripped of

international rights might not be one of

the possible sanctions they face if the

ECB investigation into the county

determines they should be charged

with bringing the game into disrepute.

It is understood that the county are

prepared for the possibility that one

sanction that will be imposed on them

is relegation into Division Two of the

County Championship.

The ECB’s investigation is likely to

take several months but the decision

about whether Headingley hosts the

Test against New Zealand next summer

will have to be taken before that

because of the logistical challenges of

moving the match to another venue

and selling tickets.

O’Sullivan fumes at crowd

Snooker

Hector Nunns

other table came and went. The bars

were heaving at the venue with a large,

noisy pre-Christmas crowd.

In a further long exchange with Jan

Verhaas, the referee, O’Sullivan called

for a photographer who was observing

all the protocols to be thrown out of the

arena. O’Sullivan said: “I can deal with

loads of movement or no movement —

but not both. And it should be a

standard for a photographer to have a

tripod, which is why I asked him to be

removed.”

Wilson will play Belgium’s Luca

Brecel in the semi-final. Brecel saw off

Anthony McGill 6-2, and Zhao Xintong

won six frames in a row to beat Jack

Lisowski 6-2 and reach the last four.

But emotion and psychology are so

important there will always be room

for the unknown.

I was reminded of all this again,

when I woke up from a jet-lagged

slumber in Sydney today. An email

pinged into my inbox, trailing a new

podcast with the sports presenter

Mark Pougatch, who was a young

backpacker on the 1986-87 Ashes

tour, and who has helped those who

played in that series relive it for our

pleasure.

Not for the first time, the start of

that series hinged on the character of

one man, Ian Botham.

Phillip DeFreitas was a debutant in

the first Test at Brisbane and he

recalled how he was rooming with his

hero, Botham; how, at the eve of Test

dinner, Botham slapped down any

talk of defeatism among the team

following a shocking run of form, and

how, when DeFreitas walked into bat

only to be sledged by Merv Hughes,

Botham said he’d sort Hughes out.

He did, too; taking 22 off one over

and scoring a brilliant hundred, the

last of his hundreds in Test cricket.

DeFreitas felt ten feet tall by simply

being in Botham’s presence.

You cannot push a comparison

from 35 years ago too hard, and there

are few similarities between the game

now and then, but charismatic

cricketers have had a transformative

effect on matches and players around

them since the game began, and will

continue to do so. These types come

along rarely, and Stokes (like, in my

experience, Darren Gough, Andrew

Flintoff, Botham) is undoubtedly one

of those.

It is a curious-looking England

squad, with four players (Joe Root,

James Anderson, Stuart Broad and

Stokes) who would make selection in

most England teams throughout

history, and then many of the rest

about whom there are question marks

and for whom Australia is an

unknown. Stokes’s presence will help

bridge that gap.

If you don’t believe the kind of

impact he has in the dressing room,

it’s worth recalling what an insider

thinks. Nathan Leamon, England’s

analyst, wrote a novel called The Test

three years ago, in which only one

character, the injured and absent

captain Rob, was based on an

England cricketer in real life. That

was Stokes, and this is how Leamon

described Rob: “He is genuinely a

person apart... different both in kind

and degree to anyone I’ve ever

known. It is difficult to describe, hard

to capture his presence... he is the

centre of the room... in here, he is

rudder, and compass and engine. The

whole team, different and disparate,

most of them older than he is, follow

him without a thought. Without

question, without doubt, without

fear.”

Who knows how readily Stokes’s

cricketing antennae will become

attuned again to the technical

demands of the game; early signs in

the four-day match against the Lions,

when he scored 42 and took a couple

of wickets, are hopeful.

His absence has been a long one,

though, and maybe we should not

expect too much. That said, his

competitive fire is innate and his

attitude a given.

Think of him like the sun, drawing

the flowers around him upwards

towards the heat and light. Langer

and Australia know all about his

threat, but England’s players will walk

a little taller in his presence as well.

6 Inside the Tour: The Ashes ’86/87,

hosted by Mark Pougatch, is available

now

Disgraced athletics chief

Diack dies at home at 88

Athletics Lamine Diack, the former

head of world athletics’ governing

body who was convicted of

corruption last year, has died of

natural causes aged 88.

Diack led the International

Association of Athletics Federations

from 1999 to 2015. He was later found

guilty of running a clique that

covered up Russian doping in return

for millions of dollars in bribes. He

also accepted Russian money to help

finance the Senegalese leader Macky

Sall’s 2012 presidential campaign.

A French court sentenced him to

four years in prison in 2020 but he

remained under house arrest in

France and was later released on bail,

allowing him to return to Senegal.