“The Hit Man. Don’t mess with Ben Stokes – he’s fast and furious”. So trumpeted the front page of the Times magazine on Saturday 23 September less than 48 hours before his early-hours arrest in Bristol city centre following a street brawl. The tonally prescient interview with the England cricketer homed in on his reputation for being short-fused and pulled out the quotes: “The adrenaline is there. But I’d never get close to punching someone” and “I’ll have a few pints the night before a match. I’m 26, not 14.”
Here was the latest celestial all-rounder of the England cricket team, cut from the same talismanic cloth as Sir Ian Botham and Andrew Flintoff before him. But Stokes was also presented as the bad-boy sportsman a casual weekend reader needed to know: a flame-haired, tattooed athlete with a supreme talent but also the propensity to be a lightning rod for incidents on and off the field.
This persona, one set up in his 2016 autobiography, Firestarter, and countless interviews before it, was not without basis. A highly charged competitive streak has been a constant from his early years as a schools level prodigy in Cumbria who had arrived with his sporting parents from New Zealand aged 12. The law had been brushed along the way, equipment destroyed, disciplinary points chalked up and, at 21, an early ejection from an England Lions tour for drinking was thrown in for good measure.
But as a cricketer, aged 26 and approaching his prime, Stokes’s on-field stock was sky high at the time of his arrest in Bristol; a left-handed batsman of both destruction and diligence, a right-arm seamer who could swing the ball at pace and a prowling presence in the field with supreme reflexes. Though volatile by way of statistical consistency, Stokes possessed that Herculean ability to summon up match-changing interventions.
After catching the eye in Cumbria, and benefiting from additional training paid for by an anonymous sponsor, Stokes signed for Durham’s academy as his Kiwi parents, Ged, a former rugby league player and coach, and Deborah, a counsellor and club cricketer, committed to a twice-weekly five-hour round trip across the Pennines. Stokes soared through the county’s ranks and broke into the first team just shy of his 18th birthday.
By the time he was 22 he walking out into the cauldron of an Ashes whitewash defeat, emerging as one of the few Englishmen to meet the rampant Australians – and their tormentor-in-chief, Mitchell Johnson – head on, while striking a maiden century in Perth along the way. A star was seemingly born.
A broken wrist in 2014, suffered when putting it through a dressing room locker in Antigua, was followed by a chronic loss of form. But when the relaxed and plain-speaking Australian Trevor Bayliss arrived as England head coach something clicked in Stokes and the force returned.
From 2015 through to his arrest, Stokes became the heartbeat of England’s national teams. He balanced a Test side and delivered jaw-dropping virtuoso performances, such as an 85-ball century against New Zealand at Lord’s or the jet-propelled 258 against South Africa in Cape Town, while also being central to a revolutionary one-day set-up that has risen to No 1 in the rankings.
There was a crushing end to the World Twenty20 in 2016, when in the final against West Indies his concluding over was blitzed for four successive sixes by Carlos Brathwaite. But bar this harrowing low and subsequent injury lay-offs, it was a personally golden time on the field.
Teammates naturally gravitated towards him in the dressing room and so when softly spoken Joe Root was promoted to the Test captaincy in February 2017, Stokes was the obvious choice to step up as the Yorkshireman’s deputy. The two friends had first played together for the North of England schools 11 years earlier.
This extra tranche of responsibility was also a small way of keeping him engaged. A week after becoming Test vice-captain, he secured a £1.7m deal to play in the Indian Premier League – the highest price tag paid for an overseas player.
But since he stepped out into the streets of Bristol in the early hours of 25 September, Stokes’s career has flatlined. A tour to Australia was sat out, sponsors lost. While the England and Wales Cricket Board felt unable to suspend his pay and the IPL called again with a £1.4m deal at Rajasthan Royals, the stellar performances have gone back to fleeting of late.
During the winter, when Stokes was playing domestic cricket in New Zealand in the hope of somehow returning mid-Ashes, a senior official at the England and Wales Cricket Board sighed the wish that all the people left hurt, stressed and inconvenienced by the events in Bristol could be put together in one room for the all-rounder to truly comprehend their impact.
In turn, some of those people may also wish to ponder their part in fanning the flames of the Firestarter image. But while there is the small matter of the ECB’s disciplinary probe still to negotiate – possible sporting sanctions that could include matches already missed – in the long-term Stokes’s acquittal on the charge of affray means he is now free to continue a career that had long been clearing bars and putting bums on seats.
