Ben Stokes, everybody agrees, is a man on a mission. But it might be more accurate to call him a man on two missions. He doesn’t merely long to make Test cricket exciting: he yearns to make selection boring.
Picking the England team used to be a national sport. The worse they played, the more fun we all had working out who should take their places. Not any more. Selection has become a game that even the selectors themselves can barely be bothered to play. At the end of a Test, when we’re still trying to get our heads round the cliffhanger Stokes has just concocted, the news slips out in a single sentence. “England have named an unchanged squad for the next Test.”
