No one writes books about how to be the best second-in-charge, there is not an entry on it in the MCC manual or a chapter in Don Bradman’s The Art of Cricket and Mike Brearley never penned The Art of Vice-Captaincy. The job spec for it depends on the particular dynamics of the team at that moment and the whims and preferences of the captain and coach. England have had three of the vice-captains in their Test team in the past 18 months: James Anderson, Jos Buttler, and, now, for the second-time around, Ben Stokes, who lost the job in the fall out from that brawl in Bristol.
Anderson had it because he was the senior man and a steady pair of hands at a time when the team was in crisis; Buttler because he is the brightest of the young batsmen and the man most likely to take over the captaincy of the one-day team when Eoin Morgan retires; and Stokes because he is a talismanic player, “the real heartbeat of the team” was how Ricky Ponting put it this week and compared Stokes to Andrew Flintoff: “The guy they go to whenever they’re in trouble and they need something; the guy Australia need to keep quiet if we’re going to win the series.”
Now he is back acting as Joe Root’s right-hand man for the Ashes, with the explicit backing of every last member of ECB’s hierarchy, from the kitman up. England’s press release made a point of mentioning that the appointment had been endorsed by the director of cricket, Ashley Giles, the chief executive, Tom Harrison, and the chairman, Colin Graves. All Stokes needed to do was win them a World Cup.
Joe Root (Yorkshire) captain, Moeen Ali (Worcestershire), Jimmy Anderson (Lancashire), Jofra Archer (Sussex), Jonny Bairstow (Yorkshire), Stuart Broad (Nottinghamshire), Rory Burns (Surrey), Jos Buttler (Lancashire), Sam Curran (Surrey), Joe Denly (Kent), Jason Roy (Surrey), Ben Stokes (Durham) vice-captain, Olly Stone (Warwickshire), Chris Woakes (Warwickshire).
However, this promotion is less about rehabilitating Stokes than it is about acknowledging how much responsibility he has taken on for holding together this fragile England team. Like Ponting said: “It seems like he’s playing with a lot of maturity; he doesn’t seem like he’s in much of a rush now as he might have been.”
If you split his career into what happened before and after he was dropped by England, you can see the change reflected in his statistics. Beforehand, Stokes had a batting strike rate of 64 in Test cricket and 98 in the one-day game; since he has come back, he has a strike rate of 46 in Test cricket and 87 in one‑day cricket. At the same time, his batting average has fallen from 36 to 29 in Tests, but risen from 35 to 54 in ODIs.
He is a slower, steadier batsman now; less threatening in attack, perhaps, but more formidable in defence. He has become a player who will turn his hand to whatever the team need him to do. Whether it is the 89 from 115 balls in that defeat against Australia in the group stages of the World Cup, when he came in with the score 26 for three in the sixth over. Or the 79 from 54 he clobbered in their very next game against India, his innings beginning when they were 207 for three in the 34th. Or even the eight off three balls he scored in the Super Over at the end of the final a week later.
You can see that flexibility in his bowling too, where he has learned to take on very different roles for England’s Test and one-day teams. When he is playing with a white ball, Stokes tries to dry up the runs. Among the 71 fast bowlers who played in this World Cup, only three of them bowled as many cheap overs as Stokes did. He got through 50.5 at an economy rate of 4.83 each. Amazingly, he was not hit for a single six in the tournament, which is some turnaround for a man who once got walloped for four sixes in four consecutive balls in the last over of the World T20 final.
Upshot is, he is taking fewer wickets with a white ball than he used to. But in Test cricket, where he his role is to make breakthroughs, his bowling is more penetrative than ever. He has taken 32 wickets at an average of 26 with a strike rate of 49 since he came back into the team, compared with the 95 at 34 and 60 he did in the years before.
Whether all this adaptability means he is the best man to take over the team if Root goes down injured is another question, because it is surely asking a lot of him to bat, bowl and captain, too. England will be hoping they never have to find out.
