After 26 matches and more than two years, for the first time under the Ben Stokes and Brendon McCullum partnership, England will tomorrow start a Test without the former on the field.
It is, let us be honest, a small miracle that it has taken this long. For much of that period, it seemed Stokes’s chronic knee issue was a ticking time bomb on his Test career, and so that his sidelining now is through a torn hamstring feels both particularly cruel and oddly reassuring; it is hard to pull one of those if you can barely move.
