Ben Stokes overcame a challenging six-month absence from Test cricket with a blistering assault on India and yet Joe Root becoming the first player to mark their 100th cap with a double century still left the all‑rounder feeling “rubbish”.
Stokes left the England bubble in August to be with his late father, Ged, who had cancer. And though he did feature in the Indian Premier League and a Twenty20 series in South Africa before Christmas, the 29-year-old came into the first Test in Chennai with no red-ball cricket behind him and just a handful of days in the nets after clearing quarantine.
It made what followed all the more impressive, as Stokes crunched 10 fours and three sixes en route to an imposing 118-ball 82 from No 5. It was sparked by some early spitting cobras out of the rough from Virat Kohli’s phalanx of spinners and, overall, augurs well at the start of this four-Test series.
However, with Root’s 218 surpassing Mike Gatting’s 207 on the same ground in 1985 as the highest score by an Englishman in India – and now just the second batsman after Kumar Sangakkara in 2007 to register 180-plus scores in three successive Tests – Stokes was not getting carried away by his own return. “He makes me feel rubbish,” said Stokes. “That’s pretty much where he’s at the moment, he makes everyone else around him look not very good. He’s in phenomenal form, making things look very, very easy and the way he plays spin – dominates spin – is incredible to watch.
“I don’t think we’ve had an England batsman ever play spin the way he does. He’s got an answer and an option for everything that is thrown at him. It’s just a delight to watch him at the moment.”
On his own approach out in the middle, Stokes added: “Initially, things didn’t really change for me until those couple of balls in an over [from the left-arm spinner Shabhaz Nadeem] spat out of the rough at me. And so, I took a decision: ‘Right, I’m going to put the pressure back on to him as a bowler.’ I’d rather get caught deep square in the way that I did, as opposed to going back into my shell, being defensive and spooning one up to short leg.”
Channel 4, meanwhile, confirmed a peak audience of 1.1 million for the opening day – and just under a million viewers when Joe Root brought up his century – during the terrestrial broadcaster’s first live Test cricket since the 2005 Ashes. The figures suggest an average audience of 431,000 – believed to be around double that witnessed by Sky, the regular rights holders, during day one of the recent Sri Lanka series – with Channel 4 claiming around 44% of this came from non-Sky households.
Just 7% were aged under 35, however, pointing to a changed media landscape since Test cricket was last on terrestrial TV and perhaps the lack of time for Channel 4 to market their coverage properly, after announcing the deal on Wednesday.
