The view must have looked pretty good from out there on the burning deck. The sky was brilliant blue in every direction, the grass checkered and parched, and the spectators all around roared and clapped and cheered and sang while Ben Stokes whistled sixes into their midst. You wonder whether Stokes had time to appreciate the moment as he stood out at the non-striker’s end, one leg cocked, one hand propped on his bat. He had promised that his team were going to “make memories” and everyone who loves the game will remember the way he has played in these last two innings.
Trouble is that unless his team win this Headingley Test, those same people may also recall them as the first England side in 22 years to go three-nil down in a home Ashes series. The match is turning into this England side’s last stand. It’s Bazball’s Little Bighorn, and Stokes and his ragtag team are surrounded on the little patch of high ground, Australians in Baggy Green caps swarming all around.
At lunch, England were 142 for seven, still 121 runs behind Australia’s meagre 263. Stokes had been batting all morning and had made 27 from 67 balls. The ball had hit him more often than it had the boundary hoardings: he had scored two fours, but been thumped three times himself, once in the box, once on the thigh, and once on the bottom hand. The medical team came out to treat him twice, once for one of the knocks and then again for a muscle injury in his right buttock which essentially left him with one working leg.
Stokes has spent the best part of the last year trying to teach his team that there’s “no such thing as a bad shot”, a point he demonstrated by getting out to a succession of them himself last summer, often as not caught at mid-on, and which he then repeated in an article he wrote for the Players’ Tribune before this series. The idea was that he wanted them to be uninhibited by the fear of failure. Watching the rest of the batters go about their work so far in this series, you wonder whether, on reflection, he may decide that he taught this lesson too well.
Joe Root got out trying to lean on a crackerjack short ball, Jonny Bairstow was caught behind trying to drive a wide away‑swinger and Moeen Ali was caught in the deep trying to repeat a pull which he had only just got away with the very ball before. It was all very slap‑happy and it meant, again, that despite Stokes’s own best efforts they had squandered the best batting conditions of the match.
He has knuckled down to some pretty gritty batting in these last two Test matches. His early work at the crease is marked by that old‑fashioned diligence and he only accelerates when he is batting with the tail.
Which is what happened again here. There was an unmistakable air of “screw it” about the way England played after lunch, as if, having tried, and failed, to do it properly in the morning, when they ticked along at 2.7 an over, they had decided that if they were going to lose they may as well be true to themselves while they were doing it. Mark Wood clattered 18 off five deliveries from Mitchell Starc, and six more off Pat Cummins, for the fastest 24 in the history of Test cricket. Then Stokes let himself go. He hit three successive fours off Cummins, who duly decided to bring on Todd Murphy to bowl his off spin.
That change felt, in the circumstances, a little like trying to lure a lion back into his cage by tossing a couple of juicy steaks in his way.
Stokes duly walloped Murphy for five sixes in the space of 14 deliveries before he was caught at long-off.
For that one long, happy hour of batting, Headingley was all sunshine, sixes and giggles. You guess Australia were happy enough to allow it. Given that Stokes made only 80 and England were still 26 runs behind, they will think they got off cheap. It would surely have gone worse for them if only Stokes had had full use of his limbs; as it was, any shot that required him to move his feet seemed to be beyond him. By the end of the innings, he seemed utterly spent.
So were his team. Perhaps the single sorriest thing about watching England so far in this series has been that so few of Stokes’s senior teammates have stood with him, Jimmy Anderson managed three wickets at 75 runs each before bowing out of this match; Jonny Bairstow made 78 on the opening day but has scored 58 runs in four innings since, and dropped six catches; Ollie Pope didn’t even make it to 50 in his four innings; Ollie Robinson’s hardly topped 80mph all series and sloped off here with a back spasm. Even Root’s returns have tailed off since he started the series with a century.
At this point, Stokes’s only really reliable allies are Stuart Broad, who seems to be running largely off spite and adrenaline, and Mark Wood, who may well have spent himself in this one Test. He will need more from the rest of them if England are going to dig themselves out of this: even he has only so many miracles in him.
