Illustration by Andy Bunday
W hen Ben Stokes called the earlier generation of England captains who had criticised his team’s Ashes preparations “has-beens” this week, the arrow flew at Ian Botham, the foremost grumbler about England’s warm-up schedule in Perth.
Stokes is Lord Botham’s protégé – the most gifted all-rounder since the yeoman “Beefy” was in his prime in the 1970s and 80s. Surely Stokes wouldn’t be rude about his great forerunner? Michael Vaughan and Graham Gooch had shared Botham’s misgivings. Vaughan instructed Stokes to “respect” their views.
Here was the encapsulation of Stokes’s character: no holding back, no deference to authority. A diplomat from the old school of captaincy wouldn’t have dared to be so dismissive. But then Stokes was never the establishment type. With bat and ball, and his heroics in tight spots (a strong Botham echo), he has ascended to a kind of untouchability. He does – and says – what he wants, and to hell with people who don’t like it.
From enfant terrible to statesman is an unusual trajectory. English cricket crowds love his miracles and admire his non-conformism. He’s a national team leader from outside the traditional private school channels. He brawled in the streets of Cumbria as a youth, once broke his hand punching a locker, and might have lost his career altogether after a fist fight outside a Bristol nightclub – in defence, it later turned out, of two fellow night owls who were being homophobically taunted.
Stokes, 34, was born in Christchurch in New Zealand, but raised in Cumbria, where his family relocated when he was 12. He was educated in Cockermouth’s state comprehensive. His late father, Ged, was a notoriously hard rugby league international who asked for a dislocated finger to be amputated so he could return quicker. Stokes jnr gives a crooked finger salute to his departed dad during matches and inherited his courage in the face of injuries.
It was in Cockermouth that he learned to impose himself. He spent a night in a cell after jumping off a wall to play the peacemaker between police and a friend. “Beer was the most constant thing in my diet,” he said of his early cricketing days, in his first autobiography, aptly titled Firestarter.
He has a kind of untouchability. He does – and says – what he wants, and to hell with people who don’t like it
Sent home from an England Lions tour in 2013, he was told by coach Andy Flower: “You don’t want to play for England. You just want to piss it up the wall with your mates and have a good time.” Stokes wagged his finger at Flower and said: “I’ll prove you wrong.”
And he has, though the Bristol brawl of 2017 still reverberates. He missed that winter’s Ashes tour before being cleared of affray in 2018. Being suspended for that series (England were hammered 4-0) has heaped pressure on him to make amends on each of his subsequent trips to Australia.
To the portrait of an unconventional rise must be added the six-month break he took in 2021 to prioritise his mental health. He spoke of anxiety and panic attacks and struggling with his father’s death in 2020 from brain cancer. “I’d give off this bravado of being a big, tough northern lad with tattoos,” he said. “I was like ‘well, I am tough, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t struggle mentally’.”
Botham was an alpha male hellraiser in tune with his boisterous, side-burned times. Stokes, too, exudes main character energy but in a more nuanced, brooding fashion: a warrior who embraced the artistic freedom of England’s risky “Bazball” cricket without discarding older principles of resilience, unity and fight.
There isn’t a country in world cricket that enjoys playing against him. First, he can take a game away from them with a single inspired passage with bat or ball – or in the field. His calling card is all-round talent. The indomitability he exudes, his embrace of stress and pressure in the biggest contests, has made him the opponent from hell.
Like Botham, Stokes can point to a string of landmark performances that conferred indelible greatness: a majestic innings of 258 in Cape Town in 2016 – the second-fastest of all time – and a seminal six-week spell in 2019, when he saw England through an impossibly tense “super over” (in football terms – extra-time) to win the World Cup, then struck 135 in an Ashes Test at Headingley when his team were in dire straits.
Arriving in Perth for the first of five Ashes Tests, Stokes was met by the usual slew of spicy headlines. Joe Root is the world’s best Test batsman but has yet to score a century in Australia – so the local press pictured him pushing his airport trolley beneath the headline, Average Joe.
Australian cricket picks its intended victims before the action starts. The theory is that breaking down the most dangerous foes can cause the whole England team to collapse. They’ve never had much luck with Stokes. The Western Australian called him a “cocky complainer” but the blow came nowhere near to landing.
“Ben Stokes thrives when he has a point to prove,” said Steve Finn, the former England bowler. “There are players you really don’t want to provoke because it makes them even better and even more determined. He falls into that category.” Ben Duckett, one of England’s opening batters, says his captain has slipped into “beast mode” for the Ashes.
With his gingery Vincent van Gogh bearing, and knack for plain speaking, Stokes embodies the theory that character is destiny. In England’s only warm-up game he urged his team to go “balls to the wall” to get ready in time for the battle with Australia.
He said balls, too, to Botham, Gooch and Vaughan. Their time has gone, he suggested, with the “has-beens” remark. The essence of him is a kind of extreme of the moment awareness. The bigger the stakes, the greater his focus on the current task, the next decision – and the more he likes it. Australia will have to pick on someone else.