Mid-career autobiographies often grate and in a sporting context, in the knowledge that retirement comes with half-a-life still to live, they tend to feel needlessly premature.
Lewis Hamilton released his, titled ‘My Story’, in 2007, before he had won any of the seven Formula 1 World Championships for which he is known. A year later came Wayne Rooney’s first book, with the same imaginative title and well over half of his 120 England caps still to be won.
In the case of Ben Stokes, however, there is small mercy in the fact that by the time the latest stage of his career - that of Stokes the skipper - began, its predecessors were already safely catalogued on both page and documentary film.
As a player of rank and file, Stokes’ legacy is already secure, a World Cup winner in both white-ball formats, orchestrator of one of Test cricket’s great miracles, not to mention several of its great knocks. This year’s series, as much as he insists otherwise, has the potential to define Stokes’ tenure as leader, a reign that has so far produced an extraordinary run and a whole lot of fun but for now still missing the golden seal that, really, only the Ashes can provide.
But as the carnage begins, and the intensity of this ancient rivalry, the whims of this fickle old game, take hold, it is worth pausing to reflect on what has come before.
“It’s a role I never aspired to,” Stokes said on Thursday, a year into his captaincy, which probably explain why things have gone so well. The red flag with prime ministers tends to be that they want to be prime minister. Gareth Southgate, the other outstanding leader currently operating in English men’s sport, never particularly fancied his gig either.
In the hardly far-reaching search for Joe Root’s successor, Stokes was the default choice, but still one that plenty thought Rob Key - himself newly appointed as managing director of men’s cricket - unwise to make, the all-rounder already an all-facet, all-format player and, more pertinently, just back from an extended mental health break.
Set against the concern that the burden might prove too great, though, was the theory that Stokes’ own struggles would position a most macho cricketer as a figure of rare empathy, and the certainty that his example on the field would have others not merely running through brick walls, but rebuilding them with blood, sweat and tear infused cement, ready to be nailed again.
Ironically, it is only Stokes’ physical wellbeing that has so far threatened his ability to fulfil the brief and missing overs seem a small price to pay for the transformation sown.
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“The biggest thing that I wanted to try and do was keep that trust in the relationship [with my teammates] that we had before and make them believe that they were better than what they actually thought,” Stokes said. “Hopefully, I’ve done that.”
The results are indisputable. Ollie Pope, backed from day minus-one, was, before play began today, averaging almost 50 at No3. Jonny Bairstow spent last summer moonlighting as a freak of nature. James Anderson and Stuart Broad, from the brink of being discarded, are riding the horse with more abandon than ever. Jack Leach had grown, in self-belief, perhaps more than anyone, though fortune has snatched the spinner’s series away.
An Ashes win would cement Stokes as an all-time great
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“You can play cricket with a smile on your face,” Stokes added. “You can go out and enjoy it, even though you are playing at the highest level where everything is under a microscope and you’ve got millions of people watching you all over the world. You can still play this game like you did when you were younger, just for the enjoyment if it. I think that’s a pretty good win for myself.”
Ah yes, wins, the thing this all ultimately boils down to, England (probably) needing three of them across the next six-and-a-half weeks to regain the Urn.
“I’m very vocal around us not being a results-driven team,” Stokes said yesterday, which is all well and good, but one can claim not to be money-oriented and still sense that being rich would take the sting out of being poor.
Clarification, thankfully, was forthcoming: “We want to win the Ashes. I want to win the Ashes.”
After a year that could hardly have been imagined better, that, for this summer at least, is all that’s left for Stokes to achieve.
