Of course it all came down to the declaration didn’t it? Just like the man on the radio phone-in said it would. Ben Stokes’s bold/brainless decision (note to subeditors: I’m on deadline, so please delete as appropriate) to call his batsmen in early in the first innings turned out to be a truly inspired/idiotic bit of captaincy. Joe Root was on 118 at the time, and Ollie Robinson had 17, the two of them were rattling along and common sense dictated they should be left to get on with it. But Stokes thought differently.
Well, the handful of extra runs England would have made/the precious time Stokes saved really told late on the fifth day.
So did the calls the selectors made before the game. Everyone knew how they were going to play out. The decision to bring in Jonny Bairstow as wicketkeeper paid off when he made that counterattacking 78 in the first innings/proved costly when he missed a stumping and three catches; and as for picking Moeen Ali, who hadn’t played a first-class game in two years, that turned out to be such a discerning/desperate bit of thinking when Moeen took three crucial wickets/conceded almost 200 runs in his 47 overs.
And the tactics in that last hour? The decision to wait to take the new ball, to set the field back, to keep Jimmy Anderson out of the attack. Well you just knew, didn’t you?
The truth is the rights and wrongs of every one of these decisions turned on the one thing Stokes insisted doesn’t actually matter much at all: the result. And since Australia won by two wickets, you don’t need me to tell you how they look now. There will be plenty of other people to do that for you, on radio, and TV, in the papers, on the comment sections, and down the pub.
The margins are thin in Test cricket. If Stokes himself had only held a leaping one-handed catch off Nathan Lyon, Australia would have been down to their very last batters with 30 runs left to get. And he so very nearly did.
But he spilled it as he came back down, and the ball tumbled out on to the ground. It’s cruel that a game played over five days can be defined by what happened in that one split‑second of action, but that’s the sport.
Or at least, it’s supposed to be. “If you fail, then you fail. So what?” Stokes said before this match started. “The bottom line is, everybody fails at some point, so you might as well go out batting the way you want to. That won’t change just because it’s the Ashes. We’ll move on, we’ll go to sleep and we’ll wake up the next day, hopefully with the sun shining, and we’ll just go again.”
Stokes’s approach is to ask his team to play the right way, enjoy themselves, entertain everybody else, and let the result look after itself. It is, you have to say, an unusual strategy for a professional sportsman, and meant, you guess, to take the pressure off his players by reminding them there’s really nothing much to fear in losing. It’s a lesson he’s already taught them once before.
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Ten months ago, England lost against South Africa at Lord’s. Maybe you remember it. They had won all four games they’d played so far that summer, against India and New Zealand, but were routed by the South African attack, who bowled them out for 165 in the first innings and 149 in the second. There were an awful lot of people waiting to say “I told you so” after that happened. Because if 140-some years of Test cricket have taught us anything it’s that of course you can’t keep batting like that and expect to get away with it.
We expected Stokes to recant everything he’d said, or at the very least to express a little regret. He didn’t. “Did we commit to everything?” he said instead. “If everyone can say yes, 100%, but we just didn’t execute, then things are good.” They won the next Test by an innings, the one after by nine wickets, and the series 2-1. The “told-you-sos” will sound again now, louder than they did last summer. Stokes and his players will face a lot of hard questions about what England got right, and wrong, and what they’ll change before the next game. And while they might well do a little tinkering, anyone expecting him to change direction now hasn’t been paying attention.
It was interesting to watch England in the moments after Pat Cummins hit the winning runs. They didn’t look, or act, like a team who had just lost a game that they probably should have won. Stokes even seemed to be smiling. He slapped Cummins on the back, and wrapped a couple of his teammates up in a hug. England lost one of the most memorable, and entertaining, games of cricket played in this country in a long while, and are now 1-0 down in the series. But, hell, there are four more still to play and, Stokes will be pleased to know, the Met Office is indeed forecasting that the sun will be out tomorrow.