3 minute read
Voids get filled. The England Test team therefore has an awful lot of new stuff on the way later this summer – chiefly in these three main areas.
Captaincy
If Ben Stokes isn’t England captain then the two most obvious replacements are Joe “Craptain” Root and Harry “Dingbatter” Brook.
Clearly we’d all greatly prefer it if Root was permitted to keep his whole focus on batting. Similarly, Harry Brook’s peak performance seems to hinge on batting like a complete dingbat. We can’t tell you how much we worry that the responsibility of captaincy might dampen his enthusiasm for playing that way. Actually, that’s not true – we can. We wrote 1,500 words on exactly that topic and reference the article regularly.
Furthermore, whoever takes over, are they honestly likely to wheel out mad captaincy gambits like asking an attack entirely devoid of fast bowlers to deliver 98% short balls for 51 overs in a row? (That is an actual thing that Ben Stokes actually did, not some wild rhetoric.)
All-roundering
England are going to stop picking spinners while saying “balance the side” a lot, aren’t they? We can be pretty damn sure of this because they did it last week.
While he can’t actually seem to make any runs at the moment, Stokes does still carry the reputation of being a batter as well as a bowler. This means that whenever he’s been available, England haven’t immediately felt obliged to dick about sacrificing whole aspects of the game (spin bowling) in the name of ‘balance’.
Sometimes they’ve gone down that grim road anyway. Just imagine how often it’ll happen without a cricketer they can pass off as both a proper batter and a proper quick bowler.
Nonsense
Most strikingly of all, it’s hard to imagine that the on- and off-field nonsense voids created by the absence of Stokes can possibly be filled any time soon.
We don’t even need to think back too far to appreciate the alacrity with which he ticks both boxes. Stokes is basically retiring because he stayed out past his bedtime and when that decision was made public ahead of the 11th over of a bowling spell, he took a wicket with his very next ball. That would be top level on- and off-field nonsense for most players, but in his case it’s just a couple of things he’s done this week.
Extend the timeframe to months and years and Stokes’ historic nonsense mushrooms to frankly unmanageable levels.
Ben Stokes.
