Ben Stokes’ leadership is fracturing. Has it cracked or fully shattered? |
Apparently Ben Stokes asked his teammates to run 12 kilometres with him in Noosa National Park, and apparently they decided to sit in a bar all day instead.
Too scared to fall short of his standards, at least one of them, Ben Duckett, was not too scared to get too drunk to find his way back to the hotel.
The fracturing of Stokes’ leadership is the major theme of this tour, and the Melbourne and Sydney Tests, already presenting as ghoulish spectacles, will clarify whether it has cracked or fully shattered.
Stokes is still England’s best cricketer, even in his decline, and he is being protected for now by the diversionary attacks on his off-field higher-ups, but cricket is a captain’s game and nowhere has it been more so than in the cultish atmosphere around Stokes.
Too much blame has been placed on England’s batting shortfalls in these Ashes. At the outset of the series, you knew that their attacking approach would be hit-and-miss against an experienced Australian attack that would adapt its tactics and apply control on home pitches.
But England still scored enough runs to win the Perth, Brisbane and Adelaide Tests. Even with two of their top three not up to this level, they reined in their excesses and accumulated 575 total runs in Brisbane and 638 in Adelaide. Their batting is not as good as they thought it was, but it’s not as bad as some of their dismissals have implied.
Ben Stokes shows his disappointment after his long vigil in Adelaide comes to an end.Credit: Getty Images
The observers who gurgled approval about Jamie Smith’s four consecutive boundaries in Adelaide were the same ones who wagged their fingers when he tried for a fifth, as if four (or three, or two, or one) were thrilling counter-attack, but five was the arbitrary line, drawn by hindsight, to separate luminous brilliance from reckless stupidity.
This has been the pattern with all of England’s batting – live and die by the sword – and the results have been in line with realistic expectations.
The mystery box, the deciding half of the contest, was how England’s bowling would go against Australia’s batting (or, as it looked in the first innings in Perth, vice versa).
England’s eschewal of spin was not a bad plan. Muttiah........