This column is about the rise of high-end supermarket cheddar cheese that has delicious and addictive crunchy crystals in it. What are these exactly? And is everything just basically crisps now? This column is about the MCC being needlessly given tens of millions of pounds because the England and Wales Cricket Board sold a hat that isn’t really a hat, just the promise of a brightly coloured future-hat.
This column is about cricket umpires being reduced progressively to a theatre of facial expressions, from the brave, wounded “you’re on screen, please reverse your decision”, to the screw-you triumphalism of the confirmatory finger to an empty set of stumps. Michael Caine once said that while doing a closeup you should always stare at a fixed point, always into one eye not both eyes of your scene partner. Do we need to train Joel Wilson in this?
This column is about Ben Stokes being in the hat as England one-day international captain because Rob Key must consider all ideas and stupid is the new not-stupid. This column is about the fact “spicy” is not actually a flavour no matter how exciting you make the font on the packet. Wait, wait, wait. There was actually something in there. Which one was it?
It feels like there is something of the Donald Trump random distracting idea-generator about most public pronouncements now. We want the best milkshakes. We are going to ban one-legged people from infiltrating the milkshake factories, the one-legged people they’re out there doing this, and we’re going to stop it. Also, we’re going to invent our own central crypto currency. But let’s talk about mud. What is it? Why does it stick to your shoes?
To be fair, this does seem like a logical communications strategy in an age of information-overload. Drown them in noise. Shout things. Then just do The Thing. And naturally this way of dealing with the public has already been adopted by many of our sports governing bodies, whose existence seems to revolve around doing the thing they want, while pretending to be totally on board with the pointless and doomed things you actually care about.
There is still information to be found here. It is a question of listening hard, applying a noise filter and trying to work out which of the real things has just been said out loud. Fifa will kind of tell you what’s happening, but it will also be hidden inside a massive box made of ham, fireworks and deceit.
And closer to home the ECB has been doing this for a while, a process that has gone into overdrive during the current management-speak era, where presumably even the internal meeting minutes read like an AI-generated high-performance golf podcast. Stupid is cupid. Break it till you fake it. Bullshit walks, money talks and bullshit money walks loudest. Mmm … What’s Stokesy up to? Let me text him. OK. And that’s lunch.
There was something of that fog of distraction in Key’s statements this week about the future direction of English cricket. The best part was Key pointing out that England’s players “speak a lot of rubbish” in press conferences, a process also known in reporter’s parlance as Ben Duckett: full transcript. But the most interesting bit was also the one most outlets picked up on, that Stokes should be considered as an option for captaincy of the one-day international team.
Here we have a statement that is perhaps a victim of its own medium: a good idea that feels like a bad idea in the middle all the bloke-chat and half ideas. But one that also has lots to commend it, for reasons that go beyond being able to set a creative, wicket-taking field for mediocre spin bowling in the middle overs.
So yes, at first glance, a bad idea. Stokes is 14 years into his multi-format, triple-discipline, 267-game international career. He squeaks when he walks. His leg is basically falling off. As with all good things in English cricket, the instinct is he needs to be preserved. Plus there is the maddening notion that Key’s one successful idea, getting Stokesy in, must now be the one-size solution he applies to every single problem, like Trump trying to turn Gaza into a golf resort.
But it might actually work in practical terms. There is basically a two-and-a-half-year run to the next World Cup. Stokes has ditched the franchise churn and only does England red ball now, but there aren’t actually many Test series in the calendar, with long periods where he won’t be doing much. As my colleague Ali Martin has pointed out, this would be nine extra days of cricket before the Ashes, while the ODIs in New Zealand are basically a warmup for that.
It works on the field. Stokes doesn’t have to bowl. He retired while still a wonderful ODI batter, averaging 48 going back to the 2019 World Cup final. Best of all he’s a supreme and flexible captain, ideal for a format that now seems geared towards taking wickets. Stokes at a sunlit African World Cup, down on one knee hammering the ball like a man taking a croquet mallet to a discarded flat-pack wardrobe. This is a medium-term future vision for England cricket that I for one can seriously get on board with.
More widely it is increasingly clear the good bits of Bazball have always really been Stokes-ball, that he is the functioning brain here, Brendon McCullum the vibe-man and pheromone blower.
This comes at a time when even the admin tier of England cricket feels like bolt-on high-performance will-this-do stuff: red ankle trousers, no socks, vibing the crap out of this shit, hair, beard, jaw, shorts, calves, energy, holding a meeting in the lift on the way to the meeting and that’s actually the meeting bro. Mind blown.
Whereas Stokes is not this. Stokes is substance, skill and heart. He will also be 36 by the time that next ODI World Cup is over. This is basically what we have left of him now. So why not sweat the asset just a little, at a time when every other part of English cricket seems to be about chucking the family furniture on the fire.
Like Stokes himself, ODIs are a time-limited substance, a good format being junked in favour of an easier one to sell. Why not give them a proper send-off in the hands of Stokes, who will throw himself into it and draw every last drop.
This is the other point here. There was a respectful farewell for Jos Buttler as he left his own sinking ship after England’s exit from Champions Trophy. Personally it left me a little lukewarm, a man resigning without too many regrets, freed up now to pretend to be enthusiastic in a coloured outfit for money.
Whereas Stokes has something more epic about him, the sense that he might even be the last of something, the last England cricketer anyone will actually recognise in the street, the final cartoon-book England A-lister before the whole thing becomes more diffuse. We could wrap him up in protective cladding. But life moves pretty quickly and it is hard to think of many better prospects for the ODI in its farewell lap than as a Viking funeral for our own last action hero.
