Ben Stokes must sometimes feel like a modern Atlas, the man condemned to hold up the sky for eternity.

So oppressive is the burden of propping up this England team, with its capacity for crumbling from every conceivable position, that he is ending his Ashes tour not just mentally scrambled but physically broken.

Ben Stokes finishes the Ashes a beaten, and injured, man.Credit: Getty Images

While Jacob Bethell’s wonderful century brought a luminous ray of sunshine here, the captain hobbled through the final act in torment, his hopes of bending this Sydney Test to his will dashed by a groin injury borne of bowling himself into the ground.

The decision by Stokes to bat was valiant, given the agony from his right adductor, which made him wince in pain even as he ducked under Marnus Labuschagne’s half-trackers.

Five balls were all he could survive, with his movement so restricted that an attempted cut shot off Beau Webster caught a thick edge and flew into the hands of Steve Smith, leaping sharply to his left.

Stokes’ body language as he trudged off spoke volumes. Where usually he would seek to play the colossus, resisting any negative signal even in parlous situations, he looked for the first time like a beaten man, the sun setting on a........

© The Sydney Morning Herald