Talented, fearless, honest: the real Ben Stokes offers a lesson in character

The coach was Andy Flower, the player – Ben Stokes. And prove him wrong he did, in salutary and glorious ways, on a road of upsets, outbursts, injuries and stunning redemptive feats now framed in a kind of special Ben Stokes gallery of matches won because of him.

“Ben Stokes, what a difference you made”, to borrow a football chant. Without him, there is no victory against India at Lord’s this week. There is no bloke bowling himself empty and refusing to countenance defeat. Leadership by example has yet to be surpassed as a coercion tool.

Nobody knows how character is formed, by nature or by nurture, but we know Stokes went back for several helpings. And the most compelling aspect of his personality is that it defies the English stereotype of the good chap who was born to lead. Bazball seems engineered to fit the most unconventionally charismatic cricketer of its time.

Even now the prangs in his biography are hard to reconcile with the golden Vincent van Gogh lookalike who leads England into the fourth Test against India at Old Trafford on Wednesday with a 2-1 advantage.

There was that night in Cockermouth when beers were had, one of his mates attracted the attention of the local constabulary, and Stokes ended up in a cell after jumping off a wall to play the peacemaker (echoes of his fire-dousing role at Lord’s). Back then, he said “beer was the most constant thing in my diet”. Payday sent him straight to the bookies.

And there was that time he smacked a locker and broke his wrist, three months after an Ashes century in Australia. Not to mention the brawl in a Bristol street that threatened his whole career and caused him to miss an Ashes tour. That one ended in 2018 with him being found not guilty of affray, after it emerged in court that he had stepped in to defend two gay men who were being verbally abused.

The point of revisiting all this is to show that “character” – at the level Stokes displays it – can be a compound of helpful and unhelpful forces. Over the course of a long career from larrikin to legend, some traits will become dominant. In Stokes’ case they include talent, fearlessness, the kind of honesty that allowed him to remove himself to protect his mental health, and a rumbustious match-winning spirit. His career highlights reel now needs an intermission, like Oppenheimer or The Brutalist.

Anyone who calls their first autobiography Firestarter is trying to tell you something. The book is a starting point for understanding his primal might. In it, he wrote: “I don’t care who I’m up against. It could be the best player in the world standing 22 yards away from me, but their identity is irrelevant. I couldn’t care less what their name is. I will never let anyone defeat me…”

It wasn’t ghosted pap. He meant it. And a comprehensive school (now an academy) in Cockermouth was where he saw how hierarchies work: the Yorkshire lads he played against, with “badges on their helmets”.Cockermouth Cricket Club was his cricketing birthplace. “We beat private schools – several of them,” he boasted. Much of English cricket prefers not to speak of the privatisation of the England team, or the deracination of the sport in state schools, where 93% of British children go. Yet the great summer game draws its protagonists from a narrowing social scale.

The “talent pathway”, not only in England but in Australia and other countries too, is through the stunning cricket facilities of the big fee-paying institutions. Private school talent hunters whisk the best away to Arcadian fields, with no guarantee of success, but a much improved chance of it.

In 2019, a study by the Sutton Trust located men’s professional cricket in the top 10 professions for independent school attendance, tied with the news media on 43%. A year later, private schools supplied nine of the 11 England players who faced Pakistan in a Test.

A clue to the sport’s anxiety about “reach” is the new T20 Knight-Stokes Cup, starting next year, “for state schools” and named after Heather Knight and Stokes. What fully open sport, you might ask, needs to invent a competition specifically for the “other” 93% of the population.

None of which is to say Stokes is a wonderful cricketer because he was state educated. Nor are guilt trips necessary for kids helicoptered into the Millfield or Bedford elite. The processes that form “character” are too complex for easy categorisation.

But the inescapable suspicion is that the British educational system buries many kids and elevates unfairly others with much less talent or tenacity. There may not be a Ben Stokes hidden in every comprehensive school because there is only one like him. The sad part is, with the way the dice are loaded, we may never know.

Photograph by Julian Finney/ECB/Getty Images