Suites are not cheap at the Southampton Hilton. During the Test they run to £200 a night, which gets you a king-size bed, a 42-inch HDTV, access to the executive lounge and a pitchside view of the Ageas Bowl. England are staying there for this Test, so the first thing their players saw on Saturday morning was the crosshatched nap of the lush green outfield and the 22-yard strip of the pitch, pocked with footmarks, the stage for a pivotal day’s play in the series. For one or two of them, it might just have been the last thing they wanted to see when they pulled open their curtains.
All of England’s top six batsmen had a point to prove, one way or another. This summer they have not made a single hundred in 48 innings between them and their combined average of 26.08 is the lowest of any England side in a home season this century.
Their two openers are only just clinging on to their spots, their captain is being out-batted by his opposite number, they have two wicketkeepers who seem to be competing with each other, one all-rounder who has only just been recalled and another who is waiting for a disciplinary hearing after he was caught fighting in the street.
Between them, they needed to cobble together a score that would win them the match, and with it the series. When Jonny Bairstow fell, out to the most idiotic shot first ball after the lunch break, it felt as if they had blown it. Bairstow, like Keaton Jennings and Alastair Cook before him, had not done his cause any good.
They were 92 for four then, 65 runs ahead. And then Ben Stokes came in to bat. For the past four years, Stokes’s arrival at the crease would cause people to hurry back to their seats. This time, anyone rushing back would have soon realised they could have taken their time.
Stokes was not in swashbuckling mood. Anything but. His innings was one long exercise in self‑restraint. After 25 balls, he had scored a single run, after 50 he had made 12 and after 100 he had 26. When he was finally out he had 30 off 110, which made it one of the very steadiest and most sedate innings of his Test career. He has only once made a slower double‑figure score, against Pakistan in Dubai in 2015, when England were trying to bat out a draw on the fifth day. It was slow going in the first innings here too, when he made 23 off 79. He has never faced so many balls for so few runs in a Test match.
Stokes has been playing this way ever since he came back into the Test team in March. In the 39 matches he played before then, he was scoring at a rate of 64 runs for every 100 balls; in the six he has played since, the figure has fallen to 38.
For four years, Stokes was the fastest-scoring batsman in the team. This summer, he has been the slowest. It seems that either he is determined to show he can play that way or he has forgotten how to go about batting the way he used to.
Either way, Stokes has tailored his game to fit the needs of a team that already has a lot of shot-happy batsmen. When Stokes came in Mohammed Shami was on at one end, Jasprit Bumrah the other, both bowling far too well for anyone sensible to take the sort of liberty Bairstow allowed himself when he tried to launch his first ball for four with an on-drive. Whatever happened, Stokes clearly resolved that he certainly was not going to get out doing something as rash as that.
Then midway through Stokes’s innings, he and Joe Root managed to contrive a run-out by trying for a sharp single, too tight for the moment’s hesitation Root took before he set off. Root’s dismissal only added to the pressure on Stokes and he seemed almost strokeless after it, deadlocked in combat with Ravichandran Ashwin.
It took the new batsman, Jos Buttler, nine balls to equal the 12 runs Stokes had made in the 58 balls he had been at the crease. And soon enough, Buttler had overtaken him altogether. All the while, everyone was waiting for Stokes’s innings to explode into life. Instead, he was caught at slip off Ashwin.
If Stokes was trying to prove how responsible he is, he did it. It was a fine innings, but felt entirely unnatural. In the long term, it will serve the team better if he plays with a little more of the old freedom.
It was Buttler who took the game away from India and Sam Curran, too, once Stokes had gone. Both played with controlled aggression. But Stokes seemed to be so hellbent on staying in that he was willing to let the bad balls go. He almost tied himself in knots just trying to survive. Asceticism does not suit him, however well he does it.
