According to lore some of the very best Test captains are the ones who never got the job. Like Keith Miller – an admired, and audacious, skipper at New South Wales – who never led Australia because he was always on the wrong side of the selectors and in particular Don Bradman, who disliked the way Miller went about his cricket. Or Shane Warne, who won 10 games out of 11 as captain of Australia’s one-day team, but lost out to Steve Waugh on the Test job, a decision, it has to be said, which probably spared the selectors from having to sack him when his next scandal came around a few months later.
The English equivalent would be Percy Fender who was, they say, a brilliant leader of a mediocre Surrey team in the 1920s. Fender played 13 Tests but never led in any of them. His protege, Douglas Jardine, did and they are supposed to have concocted Bodyline between them.
The mathematician GH Hardy, a cricket tragic, spent his idle time by compiling all-time XIs. After he died they found in his notes a side that had the philospher Baruch Spinoza and Albert Einstein up top, Moses and David in the middle order, and God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost sharing the bowling, with Fender as the opening bat and captain.
Fender, Miller, and Warne have unblemished records in the popular imagination. Having never led, they never lost. So instead of griping about what they got wrong, we dream about how different those teams might have been if they had been leading them. Not that Australia really needed improving, in Miller’s era or Warne’s.
Watching Ben Stokes captain England this past year, through three series victories against New Zealand, South Africa and Pakistan and a one-off game against India has felt like living in one of those hypothetical timelines, as if we’ve found ourselves in the alternate history of English cricket.
England have ended up with a captain who believes that before anything else the game should be enjoyable to play and entertaining to watch. A captain who, like Miller, takes cricket just seriously enough, who, like Warne, is willing to risk defeat in pursuit of victory, and who, like Fender, is restlessly inventive in the field.
Players who see the game this way don’t often end up leading Test teams, not for long, least of all in England, where the captaincy often goes to the best batsman whether or not they have any real aptitude for it. In the past decade, Alastair Cook and Joe Root managed to break the record for leading the team on the most occasions without managing to convince anyone they had a real feel for the role. Under Cook, England won 41% of their matches, under Root it was 42%. Both went on longer than they might have because there were no obvious candidates to take over from them.
It turns out there was Stokes, hiding in plain sight all the while. Even last year there were good reasons to pass him over. The captaincy had broken England’s other two great recent all-rounders, Andrew Flintoff and Ian Botham, and Stokes was just back from a spell of rest taken for the sake of his mental health. But there weren’t a lot of options. The list of candidates ran to Stokes, Stuart Broad and Rory Burns, neither of them guaranteed a place in the team, and, apparently, Sam Billings, who had just made his debut.
The risks turned out to be worth it. If you asked England’s managing director, Rob Key, who was a savvy county captain, he would probably say he always thought they were overstated anyway.
Truth is, it came at the right moment for Stokes. His captaincy has been shaped by everything he went through before it, on and off the pitch, from being humiliated by Carlos Brathwaite in the World T20 final in 2016, through nearly losing his career when he was charged with affray for fighting outside a nightclub in 2018, to his front-row view of Eoin Morgan’s reinvention of England’s one-day team, his match-winning hand in the World Cup final in 2019 and his break from the game last year. They all influenced his leadership and his sense of what is important.
Likewise, it was the right time for English cricket. The team were at a low ebb after labouring joylessly through the pandemic and at a loss as to how to carry across their success in limited-overs cricket into Tests. The team, beaten 4-0 in the Ashes and flat bottom of the World Test Championship table, did not have a lot left to lose when Stokes took over. He has said it didn’t take much persuading to get them to start doing things differently. He had Key behind him, and Brendon McCullum, too, men who see things much the same way he does and, since the sport was going through a high performance review, a free hand to make the changes he wanted.
It was interesting listening to the new England rugby union head coach, Steve Borthwick, talk about his admiration for what Stokes and McCullum have done just before Christmas. His boss – the Rugby Football Union chief executive, Bill Sweeney – mentioned it, too. All of a sudden everyone wants to be able to play the Stokes way, whatever the sport. You wonder if Stokes would simply ask what’s stopping them.
