Outside the tongue-twisting ACA-VDCA Cricket Stadium that sits among the green hills of Visakhapatnam stands a gold statue of CK Nayudu, the first man to captain India back in 1932 and whose ancestral roots were here in Andhra Pradesh.
Nayudu probably would have approved of this England team, the plinth on which his statue sits denoting, among other feats, the 153 struck for the Hindus against MCC at the Bombay Gymkhana in late 1926. An innings that helped convince the game’s custodians that India were ready for Test status, it featured 14 fours, 11 sixes and a century brought up in 65 minutes. Bazball eat your heart out.
Not that an approach which has now delivered 14 wins from 19 for England is all about thwacking the lacquer off the ball; fast scoring is simply a byproduct, as Stokes has long maintained. Nor is it even about those results which, given the number of supporters who have paid good money to travel to India, can be tricky to square publicly at times.
But sitting 1-0 up going into the second Test that starts on Friday, and with Ravindra Jadeja and KL Rahul having joined Virat Kohli and Mohammed Shami on India’s absentee list, England now have an opportunity as golden as Nayudu’s statue. The trick, insisted Stokes two days out from the match, is not to think about it all.
“There’s a lot more to it than simply ‘results don’t matter’,” Stokes said. “It’s about not being emotionally attached to the outcome. Every time we walk out on the field we want to win but for me it’s not being tunnel-visioned towards that. It’s not a start and an end, there’s so many things you have to manoeuvre around in a Test match.
“We had a fantastic week but we knew as soon as it finished we have four left. India are a team you never, ever take for granted and that’s something we’re certainly not doing.”
At the risk of putting Stokes on a plinth himself, this outlook is one of the qualities that has made him such a compelling captain. As evidenced during the mammoth turnaround in the first Test, there is an outright refusal to ever throw in the towel. We saw this in the Test innings that immortalised Stokes, Headingley 2019, but now it is coursing through his charges.
“I think that is just me and my attitude,” said Stokes. “I guess that goes back to not having tunnel vision of winning. If you can focus on the here and now, not look too far ahead, it’s amazing what sort of position you can find yourselves in.
“If I wasn’t to imprint my personality as a person or cricketer on to the group as their leader it wouldn’t have done the group any good, or me any good as a leader. I’m very optimistic. And understanding emotionally how people can be off the field is a huge part of it. Cricket is a skill based game but there’s a lot of emotion that goes into everything.”
India (possible): Rohit Sharma (c), Yashasvi Jaiswal, Shubman Gill, Shreyas Iyer, Rajat Patidar, Axar Patel, KS Bharat (wk), Ravichandran Ashwin, Kuldeep Yadav, Jasprit Bumrah, Mohammed Siraj
England (possible): Zak Crawley, Ben Duckett, Ollie Pope, Joe Root, Jonny Bairstow, Ben Stokes (c), Ben Foakes (wk), Tom Hartley, Ollie Robinson, Mark Wood, Shoaib Bashir
Perhaps the surprise element for many these past two years has been that empathy; the kind that allowed Tom Hartley to push through a wobbly start for that match-winning nine-wicket debut last week. With Jack Leach out of the second Test, Shoaib Bashir could be thrust into the fray in Visakhapatnam despite the 20-year-old arriving late on tour and being only six first-class games to the good.
It was Stokes who flagged Bashir up to Rob Key and Brendon McCullum last summer, a scroll through social media halted when a video of the 6ft 4in off-spinner troubling Alastair Cook appeared on his feed. Bashir was twirling away in the nets on Wednesday, even nicking off his captain to an invisible first slip after similar success against him during the pre-tour training camp in Abu Dhabi.
“The first time I saw him was on Twitter. I think the County Championship [account] put a little clip together of him bowling against Sir Alastair. I saw something. The height he bowled from, it was obvious that he put a lot of action, a lot of revolutions on the ball. It was something I looked at and thought this could be pretty good for India.
“I’m in a WhatsApp group with Keysy and Baz [McCullum] – it’s not all golf swings and that kind of stuff. I actually did forward the clip on and said: ‘Have a look at this, this could be something we could work with on our India tour,’ and it progressed from there.”
England have options. Rehan Ahmed’s absence from training was solely due to it being a fasting day, Stokes said, while Mark Wood is ready to go again, even if Jimmy Anderson and Ollie Robinson enter the equation. Much will depend on the pitch, something the groundsman was keen to shoo away reporters from on Wednesday.
This is only Visakhapatnam’s third Test, with England the first visitors in 2016 when Kohli’s flaming bat delivered 248 runs across the match – two more than Cook’s men were defeated by on a surface that began bountiful but gave way to inconsistent bounce.
India are diminished without Kohli and now Jadeja but should equally know chances to put the first Test out of sight were squandered. Kuldeep Yadav’s left-arm wrist-spin presents a new challenge, while a net session with plenty of sweeping from their batters suggested Rajat Patidar could make his debut in the middle order. That England now have their hosts actively exploring the shot is pretty monumental in itself.
