For Ben Stokes the demands of international sport have always been specific and rarefied. Your everyday Test cricketer faces a fairly simple two-stage examination. First up is: am I good enough? All being well this is followed pretty quickly by: how long can I keep doing this? Repeat, fingernails scraping against the door frame, for as long as humanly possible.
Stokes belongs to a more elevated caste of cricketer, those for whom vibrant, relentlessly seductive talent has never been in doubt. But whose task is instead to find a rhythm and a method in among the sparks and flashes, a way to play to wring the best out of what is so obviously there.
After 35 Test matches two things are clear about Stokes. His basic athletic talent is beyond question. The ability to strike the ball with a beautifully pure, clean orthodox violence beyond the compass of any other England batsman was on show again at The Oval on Friday as Stokes worried away, accelerated, changed down a gear and then ultimately bludgeoned his way to a high pedigree fifth Test hundred, providing both the spine and the muscle in the second half of England’s first innings total of 353.
The other point about Stokes is just as significant. Even now, in snapshot, his overall returns in Test cricket scarcely reflect the depth and force of his talent, at least with a bat in his hand. The highs have been intoxicating, from that first Test hundred in Perth against real fast bowling fire. It is an innings that still bears the odd sneaky revisit on YouTube, if only for the changing attitudes of the Australians in the field to this fearless bicep-rippling tyro, the shift from grinning, bullying short-pitched assault, to head-scratching field changes at another turf-scorching drive, and ultimately into respectful applause.
The issue with Stokes has been more about the points in between those skyscraping highs. How can a player capable of that innings, not to mention the cartoon superhero ferocity of that 258 in Cape Town, still average 33 in Test cricket coming into this game? The numbers are rising, although not that quickly. Since that game-changer in Cape Town – an innings so distinct and unrepeatable it is essentially to be disregarded: there is no template here for a serious international career – Stokes has averaged a flat 34.
The lessons have been more about working out how to play and score and hang in there on every surface as an increasingly effective Test No6. At The Oval on a close, grey, increasingly raucous second day of this second Test, Stokes provided perhaps the most complete, and indeed low rev, of his five Test hundreds. This was an innings of deeper gears, of real craft both in attack and defence, a hundred that, should the game continue to fall England’s way, already looks like it deserves to be called match-winning.
The moment it arrived belied what had gone before. Stokes had played patiently until he found himself batting with his fellow fast bowlers after lunch. With Stuart Broad at the crease and Stokes 20 runs short of his ton, South Africa were already spreading the field to all corners, abandoning the centre ground to keep him off strike. Kagiso Rabada was hooked with real delicacy between fielders to the fine-leg boundary. At which point Faf du Plessis decided to bring on Keshav Maharaj from the OCS Stand end to bowl into a stiffening wind.
The second ball of the over was tossed up into the footmarks, and from there launched on one knee with startlingly sudden ferocity into the boozy depths of the OCS Stand. The next was slapped in the same direction and caught by a diving Du Plessis, who carried it on to the rope to take Stokes to 97. The next ball was lofted miles over mid-off with easy, almost rather mocking power to bring up the hundred in the finest style and lift a gurgling, cackling crowd to its feet, the pressure shifting, the day leaning imperceptibly England’s way in that moment.
Stokes had batted with a sense of surgical calm until then. On 21 overnight, he started quietly in the morning gloom. Alastair Cook departed lbw to a fine delivery from Morne Morkel. Stokes retracted his claws for 20 minutes, accelerating only when Chris Morris over-pitched and was driven three times to the boundary with real authority, the ball speeding away across The Oval’s sea-green checkerboard with impressive speed. There is a wonderful edge of violence to Stokes at his best, not to mention a muscular kind of elegance. His backlift is high. He leaps a little into his shots. At times when he punches out to cover he could almost pass himself off as a kind of heavy-metal Brian Lara.
It was a wonderfully pitched innings, ending on 112 off 153 balls, with 98 dot balls scattered into its mix and 60 runs in clouted boundaries. On a day that ended up nudging Stokes’s bowling and batting averages almost level there was time also for a wicket-taking spell after tea as South Africa melted in the gloom. The question of how good, how great, how relentlessly effective he can become will continue to circle. But this was in its own way a passage of peak Stokes, with energy in the field to follow an innings that did not just change the game, but set it up perhaps decisively in England’s favour.
