Stokesiness

After Bazball was razed to ashes, the Northern Odysseus has returned home. Now for the revenge...

Goodnight and good luck…

Two equal and opposite things can be true at the same time. In a new Times piece, Mike Atherton asks whether the owners of The Hundred franchises have overpaid in coughing up £500m for their three-week window of exclusivity plus access to grounds and players. And he’s right, they probably have – here’s the caveat – for what they are currently getting.

Equally clearly, the ECB have not realised enough money for what they have sold, because they could only sell it once and now it has gone. To offer an analogy: the real estate on which Lord’s cricket ground stands has a commercial price, and yet the ground itself has a value that cannot be put in financial terms. If someone were to buy it, they would undoubtedly both overpay for the amount of land but underpay for all of the ineffable things that Lord’s means and stands for, for all that cannot be replaced.

The havoc that The Hundred window wreaked on the schedule – early summer days bulleting past, the retirement of Ben Stokes like something in a yellowing newspaper now, a white-ball series with India already half-forgotten, the women’s World Cup final interrupted by the sacking of Baz because said white-ball series began the following day, the T20 blast quarter finals happening in empty grounds while England were playing Argentina with Finals Day scheduled for 72 hours after their conclusion – all are part of the price, part of the cost of clearing the decks. How much is that really worth?

As Atherton pointed out, there was a deliciousness in Stokes’ return to Durham, the Northern Odysseus making it back to Ithaca in perfect time to biff a hundred that would remove the start of the actual Hundred from the headlines just as the publicity machine cranked out its messages and its montages.

There is more than a hint of the warrior god about Stokes, an exiled king returning to his lands, all muscles and scars and wounded ego. Revenge? Oh yeah, you bet there’s going to be some of that, and a bit of righteous carnage too.

Gloriously, the setting for this cinematic homecoming is the Metro Bank Cup, the red headed stepchild of English Summer, a competition that lands perfectly for the die-hard domestic fan as a badge of purity, the anti-Hundred, a County Championship proxy for the unwanted and unloved not blessed with a contract for the televised good times.

Stokes is the one player in England who can shift the centre of gravity that far. £500m for the Hundred, sure, but bet your last quid that anything he does in the Metro Bank will make bigger headlines, and he knows it. He may ‘fucking love’ Test cricket, and he admitted to getting the chills when he played for Durham earlier in the year, but equally he and his ‘people’ understand the optics too. Having probably pushed it too far with the whole resign and then rush off to open the batting thing, Stokes can reunite his army with a meaningful effort in a team that has an obvious piece of his heart.

Is there a bigger picture here, too, an Imax-size master plan? Until the confected curfew nonsense, Stokes was all-in for for a final tilt at Australia next Summer. Maybe the way he was hung out to dry did change things. Perhaps the love has gone, maybe his giant reservoir of willpower drained away overnight. After a winter’s pain and the death of his vision of how the game can be played, followed by the PR war post the Lord’s Test, killed what desire he had left after a decade on the front lines.

But maybe not, too. There has always been a sense of drama about Ben Stokes, a feeling that his big days are bigger than anyone else’s. There’s a dynamic at play: he’s up, then he’s down again. The epic triumphs get their sense of scale from the depths of his low moments. His great pal Root operates on one setting, humming along on a single frequency. Stokes is Meat Loaf doing Bat Out Of Hell, a symphony of excess.

You don’t think he knows it, too? Think again. This sense of narrative has mapped his career, so who could resist the grand finale, the big finish, the warrior king triumphant or carried out on his shield? The pull of a return to what will inevitably be Harry Brook’s Test team, maybe even his World Cup team too, under a compliant coach might be impossible to resist. After all, it’s not as if Ben Stokes is easily replaceable.

Unless he comes out and says so (and maybe even if he does) the circus will remain in town, self-generating its story and its headlines.

Will he come back or won’t he?

Two things can be true at the same time.

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If you’re jonesing for the World Cup, Jonathan Wilson’s The Power And The Glory, deservedly crowned Sports Book of the Year at the Charles Tyrwhitt Sports Book Awards, is out in paperback now. It’s brilliant, and it’s available here and here. Check it out!

And a friendly reminder that Vinciness, precursor to Stokesiness and unlike Stokesiness actually a real thing, is out now in paperback, yours for £10, and available here.