They say it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert. It took Ben Stokes so many more than that to get here, to the fifth day at the Oval, England captain, 2-1 down in the Ashes, 50 or so overs left to go, Steve Smith in, and his team still needing seven wickets to level the series.
All those matches he has played, for schools, clubs, county and country, through the age groups in Christchurch and Wellington and Cockermouth, for Cumbria, for Northern Schools, for Durham’s academy, their firsts and seconds, for England’s under-18s, under‑19s and Lions, T20, Test, and one-day international sides, on and on and on, in the Big Bash and the Super Smash and the Indian Premier League, years of practising, of batting, bowling, fielding, and thinking about cricket, told him, as he watched Smith batting against Moeen Ali, that what he needed to do in this moment was move himself in to field at leg slip.
Stokes waited, hands on his knees, as Moeen skipped towards the crease. The ball floated up, landed, bit, and spat off the pitch, hit Smith’s gloves and flew up, way over Stokes’s head, till he leapt and, like a boy reaching for an apple just out of his reach, plucked it back down with his fingertips. Moeen turned on his heels and threw out his arms wide either side in an appeal, Jonny Bairstow leapt into the air, while Joe Root came walking in from slip to join in with him. It never occurred to them that Stokes, England’s best fielder, had blown it. The three of them were so sure it was out that they never even thought to look for the ball.
Which was lying down on the ground by Stokes’s feet. As his arm came down and around in celebration, his hand had hit his thigh and the ball had squeezed out of his grip like a lemon pip. The umpire Joel Wilson must have been watching closely, though. He stared, then shook his head. “Not out”. Stokes grimaced sheepishly while his teammates urged him to review the delivery. He must have been hoping against hope that the third umpire would decide he had held on to the ball just long enough.
So far as any of the rest of us know, this was the second regret Stokes has had in this series. He’s only admitted to one before it, which wasn’t the declaration on the first day at Edgbaston, or batting on so long on the third at Old Trafford, but the moment he dropped Nathan Lyon when Australia needed 38 to win and had two wickets left in the first Test. Then, again, he shot into the air to take a high, one-handed catch above his head, then dropped it when his hand hit the ground as he came back down.
“God, I’m reliving it in my head now,” Stokes said afterwards. “The ball was in my hand, I just didn’t manage to make it stick. It was one of those shoulda, coulda, woulda moments.” And this was another, which is two more than he would have wanted. This one felt like it might be pivotal, too, as if it was England’s last best chance to get Smith, the one wicket they really needed, before he stole the game away from them.
This, perhaps, is the one thing people have never really understood about the way Stokes plays the game, and what he’s learned over all those years. Think of that night in Kolkata in 2016, the World T20 final against West Indies, 19 needed and Stokes bowling the final over to Carlos Brathwaite who hit him for six, six, six, six. Think of what he said to Jofra Archer before he bowled the super over in the World Cup final in 2019. “What happens next doesn’t define you as a cricketer.”
It’s not whether you win, or lose, it’s the way you play. Which doesn’t mean that victory matters less to Stokes than it does to anyone else, just that defeat does. He has spent 18 months trying to explain this, to the press, to the public, and, more importantly, drilling it into his players. When you’ve skin in the game, you stay in the game, but you win nothing if you don’t play in the game, you get love for it, you get hate for it, but you get nothing if you wait for it. Just because you refuse to be scared of losing, it doesn’t mean you have to like it when it happens. Especially when it’s your mistake that’s cost everyone.
Stokes was out bowling in the tea interval, hobbling in on his one injured leg, ready to try to make amends with one last spell of bowling. In the end it wasn’t needed. It wasn’t anything he would do that won the Test, it was what he had already done, in all those months he’d spent teaching his team to be believers, so that, with seven wickets needed and less than 50 overs to go, they played as if the thing could still be done, and the game could still be won. It was, wicket by wicket, in a helter-skelter tumble while the crowd roared and applauded so loud the sound must have carried all around the city.
And Stokes, well, he had his moment too, when Pat Cummins was in. Cummins, his opposite number, was the last man who might win it for Australia. He was the one who made England pay when Stokes put Lyon down at Edgbaston. And here was Stokes, back in at leg slip again, and here was Moeen bowling, and here was Stokes again, reaching, this time, out to his left as the catch flew towards him, and then running off into the distance screaming in celebration. He held on to the ball all the way till he had stopped moving, threw it way high into the air and waited there, right underneath it, until it was safely back down in hands all over again.
