“This week there’s probably a lot more riding on it than it normally would be, going into the final game of a three-match series being 1-1,” Ben Stokes said on Wednesday. He was facing the media for the first time since the first Test concluded with victory at Lord’s when he spoke innocently about not being “really happy until I get to share a beer with the boys”. We all know how that went.
For England the story is of yet another reset, after the post-Ashes business-as-usual-only-different reset, which then led into a debutant-stuffed reset 2.0. The latter was forced by events in Chelsea’s Rex Rooms nightclub and the England and Wales Cricket Board’s reaction to them. And now, after a physically and morally sapping defeat at the Oval and the ECB’s conclusion that there was, to all intents and purposes, no incident at the Rex Rooms nightclub after all, England go again.
