Players and commentators talk a lot about playing each ball on its merits, but actually it’s not always that good an idea. Ben Duckett and Zak Crawley gave an illustration why in the 2023 Ashes.

It’s a mad but completely true fact that England haven’t had a settled opening partnership since Andrew Strauss retired in 2012. Let’s quickly run-through who’s had a stab at opening since then (excluding the other half of that partnership, Alastair Cook).

In chronological order (deep breath)…

1. Nick Compton
2. Joe Root
3. Mike Carberry
4. Sam Robson
5. Jonathan Trott
6. Adam Lyth
7. Moeen Ali
8. Jos Buttler
9. Alex Hales
10. Ben Duckett
11. Haseeb Hameed
12. Keaton Jennings
13. Mark Stoneman
14. Rory Burns
15. Jack Leach (twice)
16. Joe Denly
17. Jason Roy
18. Dom Sibley
19. Zak Crawley
20. Ben Stokes
21. Alex Lees

Three of those players averaged over 40: Joe Root, Jack Leach and, so far, Ben Duckett.

No-one else has averaged more than 31.33.

Only five others have averaged over 30: Nick Compton, Sam Robson, Rory Burns, Joe Denly and Zak Crawley.

The bar for being considered a viable England Test opener has dropped a touch.

Cook lite

It has been a bit of a production line – one for some reason calibrated to churn out mediocre products. The sameyness of the records is striking. We’ve seen a lot of batters averaging mid- to late-20s and pretty much all of them boast strike-rates in the region of 35 to 45 runs per 100 balls.

The average innings has been characterised by studious watchfulness before either getting out to a pretty good ball or ‘giving it away’ after running out of restraint.

That’s of course a generalisation – we’re talking about hundreds of innings here – but those strike-rates don’t lie. Whether knowingly or not, a lot of people tried to imitate Alastair Cook and it is a mark of Cook’s freakish psyche that he proved wholly inimitable.

But there have always been other ways of going about things.

Cook and Strauss averaged 40.96 as an opening partnership, but that was actually a sizeable step down from Strauss’s partnership with Marcus Trescothick, which averaged 52.35, and Trescothick’s with Michael Vaughan, which averaged 48.76.

It was good to bat with Marcus Trescothick. Marcus Trescothick hit the ball.

Ben Duckett

Before the Ashes began, an incredible statistic was doing the rounds that Ben Duckett had left only eight of the 605 deliveries he’d faced as a Test match opener. According to Andy Zaltzman. Test openers ordinarily leave about a quarter of the balls they face.

When the series got underway, Duckett continued in a similar vein, playing at the first 100 deliveries he faced before leaving two of the 134 balls he faced when making 98 at Lord’s.

He wasn’t happy about this.

“One of them should have been a wide and the other one was probably over my head, so I was gutted,” he said.

Duckett is comfortable with his approach, in large part because he has been given the green light by his coach and captain.

“If I think back to maybe three years ago, I was thinking that I could never be an opener in Test cricket because of how I play, and then actually last summer I was like, ‘why not?’” he told the Independent. “Why do I have to bat like Sir Alastair Cook or these great openers of the past?”

Why indeed? It’s not like it was working for anyone else. Other than the occasional, not-very-serious flirtation with an alternate approach, England spent literally years frustrated with square pegs for not going through round holes without ever seriously considering the hole’s part in this interaction.

More shots

One very obvious reason why the flirtations referenced in the previous paragraph never came to much is because playing more shots tends to mean playing more bad shots and if there’s one thing you can count on in this day and age, it’s that the bad shots of a losing side will take on colossal significance.

Why did the team lose? Why are they so terrible? Cue a montage of all the bad shots.

We’re as guilty of this as anyone, but in our defence, we don’t do it to be critical. We do it because it’s funny and maybe also as a bit of a coping mechanism.

Ben Stokes and Brendon McCullum have brought about basic everyday competence with the bat because they don’t care about bad shots. We’ve already written a whole thing about this and we don’t want to reproduce great tracts of it here. The jus of it is that they see the bigger picture, which is that a batter who sometimes plays the wrong shot is nowhere near as bad as a batter who’s always worrying about playing the wrong shot.

And do you know what’s also true? Playing more shots probably means playing more good shots too and this brings benefits that extend beyond the mere runs you score.

Proactive batting

Before Cook and Strauss and before even Trescothick and Vaughan there was another England opening partnership that warrants a mention. Between 1990 and 1995, Graham Gooch and Mike Atherton averaged 56.84.

Those who only remember late-era Athers or only know him by reputation won’t really appreciate what he was like in his early-20s before back-knack began to diminish him. This was the best of Atherton – a period in which he averaged 45 and scampered frequent singles with age-defying fitness freak Gooch.

Because that was what their partnership was built on really: not leaves, but singles.

It was far from the helter-skelter scoring-rates we’re seeing right now, but at the start of an innings, when catchers were in position, Gooch and Atherton worked the gaps. They worked the gaps until they were filled, at which point the risk of dismissal reduced.

That is proactive batting.

In 2013, we described Kevin Pietersen as the only upper order England batter prone to trying to set his own field. All the others at that time played according to what they were presented with. A good few people misread this as a call for more six-hitting and reverse sweeping. That wasn’t at all what we meant, so we tried to clarify.

Our gripe was that while playing the ball on its merits is almost universally regarded to be ‘a good thing,’ that kind of passive, reactive batting can leave the player pretty much helpless against the best bowling. If every ball merits either a leave or an honest, respectful defensive stroke, you don’t go anywhere, you stagnate, and eventually you get out.

Graham Thorpe was the player we eventually alighted on as a less emotionally loaded example of a proactive batter. Like Pietersen, or Atherton with Gooch, Thorpe would actively seek out scoring areas and exploit them in a bid to force the fielding captain’s hand. Hard-running was a big part of this (although boundaries are always more persuasive).

Pretty persuasion

England have an almost entirely proactive batting line-up these days. There are plenty of unignorable manifestations of this, but a few subtler ones too, such as the tendency to advance down the pitch to quicker bowlers that Jarrod Kimber has written and done a video about.

The openers start as everyone else means to go on.

The early parts of Zak Crawley’s 189 at Old Trafford brought a good few reminders that he is the most gifted inside-edger in world cricket, but his and Duckett’s inclination to lay bat on ball undeniably has an impact.

Bowlers always feel in with a chance against them, but with their opposite-handedness and a difference of 25cm in height, they’re a bloody nightmare for settling on a line and length. Singles often ensue. Throw in the fact that both of them will definitely – definitely – try and smash every bad ball to the boundary and it can be hard to retain an attacking field for long.

Crucially, there are growing signs that the two of them are content to adapt to these resultant field settings rather than being seduced by their own boundary hitting. This is actually when they start looking good.

After eight fours in the first five overs of their second innings at the Oval, Duckett and Crawley nurdled. It didn’t last that long – only 10 overs or so – but nurdling can be positively murderous when the bad balls are also being put away. With men on the boundary and few catchers, England’s openers were cruising – yet the alternative for Australia felt worse.

This is the point at which you can start playing the ball on its merits – once you’ve earned it.

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The 2023 Ashes is almost here! And you’re not ready! You think you are, but you aren’t. You don’t know what to watch out for. But don’t worry, we’ve done the hard work for you and come up with this list. You need to watch out for these things…

1. Suggestions that this could be as good as the 2005 Ashes

Nope, wrong. Completely and utterly and unavoidably wrong. Even if the actual cricket is higher quality – which is entirely possible – there is simply no way to match the drama because even though you don’t realise it, the story of the 2023 Ashes is already well underway and it isn’t even close to the story of the 2005 Ashes.

No shame in that though. Doesn’t mean it won’t be an amazing Ashes.

2. Ollie Robinson’s wicket celebration

There are many variants of the Ollie Robinson wicket celebration, but the basic framework of it is a kind of upper cut finger point that is punctuated by a “Woo!”

While James Anderson may well be the greatest swing bowler there’s ever been and Stuart Broad routinely shapes Ashes series, Ollie Robinson might actually prove to be England’s most important bowler in the 2023 Ashes. We all talk about Mark Wood’s pace and when Jofra Archer might come back, but Robinson is the one who’s quietly been really very tremendously successful these last couple of years.

The bizarre trick that Robinson has managed to pull off is taking heaps of cheap wickets while simultaneously persuading everyone that his Test career is about to go up in flames at any moment. As just one example, during the last Ashes he struggled with his fitness and was at times reduced to bowling spin and yet still somehow averaged 25.54 across four Tests. Some would argue he sidestepped some punishment by being off the field at times, but quite honestly the evidence suggests the only thing he sidestepped was taking more wickets.

That series began a fitness run that went back spasm, more back spasms, tooth infection, food poisoning, another back thing and then Covid. Then he got back playing cricket a bit more regularly and just carried on taking wickets for next to nothing. He’s played New Zealand, India, Australia, South Africa and Pakistan and he averages 21.27.

3. David Warner being either rubbish or not rubbish at cricket

Do you know that David Warner is secretly rubbish at cricket? Yes, he is. Absolutely true.

At the same time he does always carry that latent threat of being not at all rubbish at cricket. It probably won’t happen, but it would be hugely awful if it did.

4. James Anderson’s opening spell

One day this ends, you know. One day James Anderson decides he doesn’t want to sling it down in a bobble hat in the Old Trafford nets in front of basically no-one any more. And as soon as he thinks that, he’ll pack it all in. Every last bit of it.

Where will that leave us? We’ll tell you where it’ll leave us. It’ll leave us with the long forgotten concept of England opening bowlers wasting the new ball.

It’s amazing to think that younger readers may not even know about wasting the new ball; may not even comprehend that ‘wasting the new ball’ is actually normality. Since the dawn of Test cricket, England opening bowlers have bowled too short or too wide or too short and wide. Some have spiced things up with a bit of legside filth, but short, wide, or short-and-wide are basically the options.

We don’t know how good we have had it these last however many years. He may have wasted the new ball in his youth, but our trust in Jimmy Anderson is complete and justified these days. No ball is truly wasted. Even the wide ones are an exercise in gathering information.

Not only that, but you know that if there is swing available, Anderson will find it. And you also know that if he finds swing, he will use it correctly and to the full. And when there isn’t swing, you can be sure that he will land his wobble ball on the spot. When it comes to bowling in England, Jimmy is the benchmark. That means you don’t ever need to mope about what someone else might have done had they been given the opportunity instead.

James Anderson has been so brilliant for so long that what he does now seems unremarkable. This is why we all need to redouble our efforts to appreciate what he does while we still can.

5. James Anderson losing his rag at something

The other great thing about Jimmy is that he is a quite majestically irritable cricketer. Even after all these years he still really, really, really gives a shit.

6. Travis Head’s head

Averages 47. Gives it a biff. Looks like he’s about to go and smoke some ribs on the grill out back after a long shift pumping gas at the truck stop.

7. England’s openers

Ben Duckett’s had three good months, which makes him just about the most successful England opener since Alastair Cook first began auditioning for Andrew Strauss’s successor all the way back in 2012. Three good months does not a Test batter make however. We’d probably be talking about Duckett’s prospects an awful lot more if his weaknesses weren’t massively overshadowed by those of his opening partner, the Wobbleatron 9000.

Unlike many, we aren’t enraged by Zak Crawley’s continued presence in the England Test team. We aren’t delighted either. We’re just sort of ignorantly and excitedly watching it unfold in front of us, like that time we went to see Event Horizon in the cinema, entirely unaware it was a horror film. What’s happening? Where’s this going? What’s up with his eyes?

8. “Doctored pitches”

Check the series previews. Have England cheated yet? There is literally nothing in cricket funnier and more baffling than the very specific Australian notion of a “normal” pitch and the unshakeable belief that anything that remotely deviates from that must by definition have been tampered with somehow.

Australians will moan about Indian pitches favouring the spinners, but it’s funnier still when they object to English pitches because they’re essentially outraged at being asked to play sport on grass.

9. Ben Stokes’ bowling

Anyone who’s seen The Prestige will know that some tricks are performed at a cost. It feels like every time Ben Stokes bowls an over, another chunk of his cricket career dies.

Stokes is not averse to sacrifice and the Ashes will obviously be a period when he’s willing to erode his body in pursuit of wickets. At the same time he’ll want to get out of bowling whenever possible.

What’s interesting is that this is common knowledge. Both teams know the less bowling Stokes is obliged to do, the more comfortable England will feel continuing to play him as an all-rounder. It’s a bit of a paradox really: the less he’s called on to bowl, the more viable a bowler he remains.

Stokes’ aim, therefore, is to keep overs in the bank. Australia’s goal is for him to fritter them away before the series is out – that way they’ll only have his batting and his captaincy to deal with and England may struggle to balance their side.

Conversely, England’s other all-rounder, Moeen Ali, will want to get through some overs so that he can recover some rhythm after restricting himself to limited overs cricket in recent years.

Australia won’t want Moeen bowling and they will want Stokes bowling. You can see how this might play out.

10. Michael Neser

If you clicked through to the 2005 Ashes article earlier, you’ll know that the defining feature of that series was how Australia turned up quite reasonably assuming that they could demolish England however they chose, having done so in every series throughout the whole of the 1990s and beyond.

Those Aussie sides were able to transcend conditions, but that incredible run of Ashes success began in rather different fashion, in large part thanks to an accurate swing bowler who really made the most of being in the opposite hemisphere.

Terry Alderman took 41 wickets in the 1989 Ashes. There were six Tests, but still… 41 wickets! This wasn’t even his best effort. He’d taken 42 in the 1981 series.

If you’re touring England and you don’t have Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath, you could do worse than turn to a bowler who can swing it like Terry Alderman. Based on his record in county cricket and the big booming arcs that brought him a hat trick against Yorkshire a few weeks back, Michael Neser could be such a man.

Failing that, more recent history suggests that Scott Boland landing it on just one corner of a postage stamp might be the way to go.

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Happy Ashes everyone, unless you’re Australian!

Rajasthan Royals owner Manoj Badale has told the BBC that, “We are going to have to think creatively about Test cricket if we want it to work.” This was shortly after he’d said the quiet bit out loud.

It’s easy to characterise IPL franchise owners as ravenous financial speculators with no love for the sport. Maybe some are like that, but most invested because they do actually have an interest in cricket and in most cases that interest predates the T20 format.

Like most of us, Badale sees that cricket’s high points are being rounded-off by its omnipresence. He says Test cricket remains his favourite format and suggests we can elevate it by making it, “more of an event.” We’re with him on this. We actually have a link to an old article in the sidebar of this website that reads Keep the Ashes an ‘event’.

Badale suggests playing Test cricket in a condensed period just once a year, kind of like Wimbledon. We get where he’s coming from, but this seems suboptimal. Maybe if this annual festival of five-day cricket moved from country to country, like World Cups do, that would retain the intrigue of varying conditions, but it’s hard to envisage anything other than significantly less Test cricket played by significantly fewer nations.

But the ins and outs of this particular idea could make a whole article on their own and that isn’t actually what we want to talk about today. What we want to talk about is Badale’s justification for suggesting such a thing.

“The amount of times I hear arguments like ‘Ben Stokes wants to play Test cricket’,” he said. “That is important, but what is really important is what the fans of the future want to watch and where are they going to spend their hard-earned money.”

Where are they going to spend their hard-earned money?

The interesting part of that quote is the last bit. That detail often gets lopped off or simplistically lumped in with the bit that precedes it as if they’re essentially the same thing – which they aren’t.

Let’s have an example:

England and Australia routinely spend six months or more droning on about the Ashes and then schedule five Tests in six weeks to get it over with as fast as possible.

What does that tell us?

It tells us a couple of things.

1. People really, really enjoy investing time in thinking and talking about big Test series – there is a real appetite for that
2. There is zero incentive for a cricket board to extend the span of a Test series so that people can spend more time thinking and talking about it while it’s in progress

We’ve touched on this in a smaller way before when we wrote about why ‘overnight’ is such an important part of a five-day Test match.

We love ‘overnight’. We love those lulls in action. We love the opportunity to revisit, dissect, plot and predict. The fun of a Test match doesn’t pause at stumps each day. If anything, much of the on-field action is really not much more than the basic fodder for a far more expansive and rewarding experience which then enriches whatever follows.

The cricket feeds our investment and our investment enhances the cricket. It’s a virtuous circle.

And exactly the same goes for the longer breaks between Tests. That spell between the fifth day of the first Test and the first day of the second Test is great. It’s an opportunity to recap, review, ponder and throw forward. But where you used to get over a week to sink into a series, nowadays you’ll generally only get a day or two. You don’t get much chance to read or watch long interviews in that time and there’s little opportunity for a broad conversation about what has happened and what might happen to develop, involving players, coaches, journalists and the public.

Why does that not happen? We have months and months of ‘looking ahead to the Ashes’ even while other series are going on, so there’s clearly a massive appetite to talk about it. Once the series is underway, surely there is only more to talk about? Why is there so little opportunity to do so?

Why? Because there is nothing in it for the people who organise the tours.

Where people spend their hard-earned money

The grim truth is that a one-day international that no-one talks about generates far more revenue than all the talking in the world between Test matches. Broader interest in an ODI can be next to nothing, but you can still sell tickets and put it on TV and sell ads because people will watch.

Comments on websites, conversations in the pub? No-one’s profiting from these (trust us on this). This kind of interest is not assigned a value. Enthusiasm is only measured by boards in dollars, rupees and pounds.

And that’s how decisions are made. ‘What people want’ is of course an element of this, but it is not as simple as ‘people prefer A to B’.

We’ve previously highlighted the ‘Test cricket doesn’t fit into modern life’ fallacy. It’s a common statement that is pretty much exactly wrong. Test cricket isn’t dying because it’s unsuited to modern life; it’s being allowed to die because it’s harder to monetise.

Revenue does not equate to interest. The game is shaped not by what fans want, but what can be extracted from them.

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Every player wants to go out on a high, but few actually do. Most topple forwards and face-plant when attempting to bow out in style. And that’s what life’s about. You do your best for a bit and then the ending’s probably going to be a little bit of a mess.

Sport is obsessed with great players going out in a blaze of glory; one final flash of genius before they swap their boots for slippers.

But while it can happen, the value of a ‘perfect’ ending is questionable anyway. What might seem like an immaculate full stop generally also brings with it the shadow of a question mark. Perhaps the player in question should have carried on just a little bit longer. And why is the memory of a final match any more significant than memories of all the other matches anyway? It’s all history.

In any case, the greatest final Test has already been and gone, so why bother trying to compete?

Glorious final Tests

Alastair Cook finished with a ton. Jason Gillespie exited with an unlikely double century. Muttiah Muralitharan secured victory and his 800^th Test wicket with his final delivery. Going further back, Vijay Merchant’s final two Test innings were 128 and 154 (albeit five years apart), while Seymour Nurse finished with three hundreds in his last six innings, vacating the stage with 258 against New Zealand.

But none of these are in the same league as Enid Bakewell.

Bakewell won her final Test for England, against the West Indies, after taking 10-75. She made 68 opening the batting in the first innings and made an unbeaten 112 in the second out of a total of 164. That’s 68.29% of the runs, which is more than even Charles Bannerman managed.

As Test performances go, it’s probably the best one.

So raise your hands, concede this one, and just play on. Play on until they’re forced to drag you from the field because you’ve turned into a massive great anchor holding the rest of the team back.

Paul Collingwood averaged 13.83 in his final series, but won the Ashes. That seems a good way to go out. He certainly seemed pretty pleased with it.

Inglorious final Tests

Before we get into this, let’s just quickly address the most immediately obvious final Test downer: Don Bradman’s duck.

To quickly sum up, the Don went into his final Test with an average of over 100 and was bowled second ball, which brought his average down into double figures.

This is, on the face of it, not an especially glorious finish – but think of it in terms of the story and the drama. Don Bradman started and ended this innings as the most consistently successful batter Test cricket has seen and so a duck was an incredibly big deal. Throw in the fact that it prevented him becoming the only player to average over 100 and this is pretty much the most famous innings of all time.

That is, in its own way, going out on a high. A three-figure average would have been an incredible feat, but 99.94 is barely less incredible and packs a far more powerful emotional hit.

1. Adam Voges, Australia

This is how you end on a downer. Briefly, during his innings of 239 against New Zealand in 2016, Adam Voges’ Test average exceeded Bradman’s. Then he was dismissed and over the course of the next half dozen Tests, that average went into a flat spin before concussion in a domestic match provided a timely reason for ejecting him.

Voges finished with a golden duck (at which point Australia were 8-4) and then 2 against South Africa in his 20th and final Test, his average dropping from 67.40 to 61.87 in the process. Australia were bowled out for 85 on the first day and suffered an innings defeat.

> Hot streaks: Test batters who hit a prolonged purple patch

2. Suresh Raina, India

What’s worse than a duck? A pair. Suresh Raina was never the most successful Test batter, but the contrasts in his final match were brutal. After Australia made 572-7 declared, India responded with 475. Australia declared again in the second innings but couldn’t bowl India out.

Raina’s contributions were a golden duck and a duck. His previous innings, against New Zealand, had also been a duck. All in all, he failed to score in five of his final seven innings. This is how to finish a Test career: unequivocally.

> Best of the blobs: Eight of Test cricket’s finest duck-makers

3. Geraint Jones, England

What’s worse than a pair? A pair while losing the Ashes, even though it’s only the third Test. Geraint Jones was picked as England wicketkeeper in large part for his batting, but bowed out with a pair in Perth in 2006, securing it either side of Australia’s 527-5 declared – an innings that included a 57-ball hundred from his opposite number, Adam Gilchrist. Jones was run out by Ricky Ponting in his final innings off a ball where he could quite easily have been given LBW.

4. Simon Katich, Australia

New Zealand’s Chris Martin is pretty much the patron saint of ducks. It was therefore fitting that in his final Test innings he should fall below even his own rock bottom standards by getting run out without even facing a ball. However, given Martin’s record, that wasn’t actually an especially ignominious finish for a man who ultimately went out with five zeros on the trot if you include not outs. You didn’t expect runs from Chris Martin. That most definitely wasn’t what he was there for.

Simon Katich though? He was an opening batter. That gives his final Test diamond duck far greater weight, even if he did go on to make 43 later in the match. Because really you could argue that first innings, first over dismissal shaped the 2010 Adelaide Test and to some extent the series.

Katich was run out by Jonathan Trott off the fourth ball of the match. James Anderson then dismissed Ricky Ponting next ball and Australia’s 245 proved entirely inadequate as England racked up 620-5 en route to an innings victory.

5. Sohag Gazi, Bangladesh

What of the bowlers though? Where a bad final match for a batter is over in the blink of an eye, there is something uniquely grim about the equivalent experience for a Test bowler.

In February 2014, Sohag Gazi went into what would be his final Test having taken 2-207 across his previous two matches. He duly returned figures of 1-181 off 48 overs in the first innings and 1-87 off 18.5 overs in the second. Rather capping things off, on a pitch on which Kumar Sangakkara was able to make 424 runs on his own, Gazi batted once and made a golden duck.

6. Arshad Ayub, India

Gazi did at least take a wicket though. In December 1989, Indian off-spinner Arshad Ayub trunded in for 0-182 from 49 overs against Pakistan. That performance came after returns of 0-81 and 0-37 in his penultimate Test.

7. Chuck Fleetwood-Smith, Australia

As poor final Tests go, Chuck Fleetwood-Smith’s is perhaps the benchmark. His innings figures of 1-298 in England’s 903-7 declared remain the most expensive in Test history.

There’s a dash of batting to throw into the mix too, as you’d expect from a man who supposedly once said, “If you can’t be the best batsman in the world, you might as well be the worst.”

Fleetwood-Smith was the last man dismissed in Australia’s second innings when England secured victory by an innings and 579 runs. He made a duck.

8. Denis Compton

Compton’s final Test was the fifth Test against South Africa at Port Elizabeth in 1957. While he finished his career with an average of over 50, Compton made a two-ball duck in the first innings and 5 in the second innings.

That would be pretty bad in itself, but it was only really in keeping with a much broader downer. Defeat meant a tied series after England had won the first two Tests and drawn the third, and this match in particular was a weird combination of dreariness and farce. The pitch had been relaid with soil from Durban but it hadn’t properly settled and this meant the action was defined by a great many grub-hunters and pea-rollers. This resulted in the slowest Test in history with a scoring at a rate of 1.40 runs per six balls (538 runs from 287.5 eight-ball overs).

A blaze of glory? Denis Compton went out in a blaze of, “Ah stuff this, there must be something better I could be doing with my life.”

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With his thin hair and love of whole milk, you could easily mistake Ben Stokes for a baby. But Ben Stokes is not a baby. Ben Stokes is a full grown adult man who plays cricket for a living. He plays it very well with a particular penchant for seeing out high pressure run chases.

If you can’t immediately work it out, the three Ben Stokes innings we’re looking at here are…

• 84 not out in the 50-over World Cup final v New Zealand, July 2019
• 135 not out in the 3rd Ashes Test v Australia, August 2019
• 52 not out in the T20 World Cup final v Pakistan, November 2022

Three unbeaten innings in run-chases, one in each format and all three incredibly ridiculous.

But which was the most ridiculous? And why are we even including the T20 World Cup final when it’s clearly not that one?

The criteria

We like to approach these things methodically and we also like to give numeric scores so that at the end we can sidestep all nuance and give a firm answer.

We will be rating Ben Stokes’ big three high pressure run-chase innings according to the Seven Aspects of Cricket Run-Chase Ridiculousness, as outlined by Jayasinghe, Farooqi, Laghari and Saltaformaggio in their seminal 2006 paper, Did You See That? Did You See What He/She Did? That Was Fully Nuts! How Ridiculous Was That?

The seven aspects are as follows:

1. Intensity of pressure
2. Duration of pressure
3. Rarity
4. What was at stake
5. Improbability
6. Jeopardy
7. Comedy

Rather than sticking with chronology, let’s instead rate the three innings in format order – that way we get the T20 one out of the way early.

T20: 52 not out off 49 balls v Pakistan in the 2022 World Cup final

INTENSITY OF PRESSURE: As Jayasinghe, Farooqi, Laghari and Saltaformaggio concede, this is always a hard one to score because pressure isn’t a constant; it builds and dissipates according to events. You can however counteract this to a degree by writing an article so long that people don’t especially want you to go into any great detail which will give you room to fudge your conclusion a bit.

It was quite obvious for most of Stokes’ innings that the T20 World Cup final was going to be a low-scoring game. This meant an ordinarily manageable run-chase seemed much more difficult and that increased the pressure on Stokes. Secondly, it was a World Cup final, which is a pretty big thing. Thirdly, thanks to his reputation, Stokes played much of his innings as The Guy Who’s Going To Win This For Us, which is a pressure in itself. Set against that, England never got themselves into too big a hole and that suppressed heartbeats a certain amount.

Rating: 8

DURATION OF PRESSURE: Easy one this. Brevity is T20’s greatest strength as a format, but also its greatest weakness when it comes to the real, stomach-churning, this-could-be-amazing-or-awful-and-I-don’t-know-which passages of play when sport is at its most intense. At 49 balls and 1h21m, this was a fairly short cricket innings and obviously not all of it was played at peak pressure either.

Rating: 2

RARITY: You don’t play in a T20 World Cup final every day. Set against that, Ben Stokes had played in one before. And there had also been a T20 World Cup final 12 months earlier.

Rating: 7

AT STAKE: A T20 World Cup and also that old classic “redemption” in the eyes of headline writers after getting nailed for four successive sixes by Carlos Brathwaite in the final over of the 2016 final. The T20 World Cup is very much the lesser World Cup though, if only due to frequency. Plus England had won it before (in 2010) so it wasn’t quite as big a deal.

Rating: 7

IMPROBABILITY: Low-scoring game, pressure of a final and everything, but we’d almost be tempted to slot this effort down on the ‘probable’ side of the probable/improbable divide. The required run-rate was only about 6.5 an over when he came in, which is no big thing in T20, and it never got much above 8 an over with plenty of wickets remaining.

Rating: 3

JEOPARDY: Jeopardy is so important. Jeopardy is the fragility of the situation. The more it feels like all you have could disappear in an instant, the more alive you feel. A lot of the jeopardy in this innings arose from the unprovable and very probably wrong sense that, ‘if Stokes doesn’t do this, no-one will’. The truth is England only lost five of their 10 wickets. Things were never really that fragile.

Rating: 4

COMEDY: It’s important to emphasise that we’re rating ridiculousness here and comedy is a fundamental part of that. (One-seventh of it, actually.) All the bonkers, unexpected things that happen over the course of an innings – all the mishits, dropped chances and near-run-outs – they all add to the ridiculousness of that knock. Let’s be honest though: Stokes’ T20 World Cup final innings wasn’t a particularly funny one. There was a trio of deliveries from Naseem Shah where he may as well have not been there and a duff-plopped almost-chance towards long-off, but not much else. The funniest thing that happened was probably just him being there. Chasing them down. Again.

Rating: 1.5

TOTAL: 32.5

ODI: 84 not out off 98 balls v New Zealand in the 2019 World Cup final

INTENSITY OF PRESSURE: New Zealand had made 241. Ben Stokes came to the crease in the 20th over and by the end of the 25th – halfway through the chase – England were 93-4, needing roughly a run-a-ball. That’s a pretty high pressure situation anyway, but that was just the starting point. From there the required rate continually bubbled up, peaking at 15 needed for an outright win off the final over. The last five overs of the innings played out with the required rate in excess off nine an over and Stokes’s presence at the crease very obviously vital for his team to have any chance of success. It’s worth pointing out as well that England had never won the 50-over World Cup.

Rating: 10

DURATION OF PRESSURE: If 98 balls doesn’t sound colossal, 2h27m maybe presents the effort a little more clearly. We would also argue that Stokes was under significant (and escalating) pressure, pretty much from start to finish. Short of a team suffering an even bigger and even more rapid clatter of early wickets, it’s hard to envisage a more protracted period of pressure for an innings played in a one-day international.

Rating: 9

RARITY: The 50-over World Cup is once every four years. England had never won it.

Rating: 10

AT STAKE: The 50-over World Cup, which England had never won.

Rating: 10

IMPROBABILITY: Improbability is not just a measure taken at the outset of an innings. It can also climb based on developments. We would also argue that it is almost the sum of all those moments because every scenario must be overcome.

Chasing 242 to win, England’s score was variously:

• 93 with 25 overs to go
• 208 with three overs to go
• 220 with nine balls to go
• 227 with four balls to go

At each of those points, victory (or at least parity) was possible rather than probable. The rating reflects that protracted unlikeliness.

Rating: 9

JEOPARDY: Given the scenarios outlined in the previous section, England needed either Stokes or Jos Buttler or ideally both at the crease to stand a chance of matching New Zealand’s score. From the start of the 24th over to the 45th over, a wicket would have removed one of them from the equation. That was when Buttler was dismissed and from then on, realistically, it was all on Stokes. He could not get out. That is a very fragile situation and so very high jeopardy.

Rating: 10

COMEDY: At one point in this innings, Ben Stokes played a diving blind shot for a cumulative six. That alone would put it in the top percentile of comedy knocks – but then just think about the climax. The end of England’s run-chase was one of the purest examples of how cricket can be much, much funnier than any other sport thanks to its dense labyrinth of confusing rules.

These are the bare facts: England needed 22 off nine balls. Two of those nine were dot balls, three resulted in wickets and three were sixes. One of the sixes was caught by Trent Boult while he was straddling the boundary. Stokes took a run off each of the final two deliveries and both resulted in run-outs.

Rating: 11 (Spinal Tap value because this is pretty much the benchmark for comedy one-day innings.)

TOTAL: 69

Test: 135 not out v Australia in the 2019 Ashes

INTENSITY OF PRESSURE: The only thing that really tempered the intensity of the match situations Stokes faced at Headingley in 2019 was hopelessness; the forlorn sense that this was already out of his and England’s reach and so there really wasn’t much he should worry about. But you can’t go from there to winning a match without passing through the intervening levels of pressure – and even by undertaking such a journey, you kind of raise the pressure anyway. The blunt truth is that Ben Stokes put himself in positions where victory or defeat in an Ashes Test that most England fans had previously given up on was entirely in his hands. People really, really want to see things like that happen and that fact brings additional pressure.

Rating: 10

DURATION OF PRESSURE: It was a 219-ball innings that lasted five-and-a-half-hours. There was pressure throughout and significant pressure the majority of the time.

Rating: 10

RARITY: Ashes series are every couple of years and there are five Tests in a series, so in that sense this wasn’t that rare a thing. Match situations like this, however, are incredibly rare. Combine the two and you’ve got your rarity score. (We do however have to subtract one point for not being the first against-all-odds Ashes turnaround at Headingley.)

Rating: 9

AT STAKE: An Australia win and they would have retained the Ashes. The Ashes comes around more frequently than the World Cup and England have won a whole bunch of times. But that isn’t the full story. The true measure of this innings is the hope it magicked into existence; the innards-twisting, delighted disbelief that something amazing could happen; and the desperate, desperate, desperate need for that not to be thrown away. That was what was really at stake.

It’s about investments. Any England supporter who invested in this match when Stokes was making two runs in 50 balls the night before saw that investment mushroom into something sizeable the following day when it became plausible that England could actually do this. When the home team subsequently careered deep into implausibility before boomeranging back again, that investment became unquantifiable.

Stokes made three runs off 72 balls in this innings before he hit a boundary – not just an investment, but an investment against the odds. And he kept adding to that investment. By fighting back from a dire first innings and several all-but-hopeless situations during the run-chase, he ensured that something else was at stake at the finish: that wonderful, childish idea that, ‘it ain’t over til it’s over’.

Rating: 10

IMPROBABILITY: England have delivered some mad Test run chases since, but it’s worth revisiting the context of this one because it is, quite simply, unmatchable. They were chasing 359 in their second innings having been bowled out for 67 in their first one. Also, just by the way, they had never actually chased 359 in the fourth innings before.

From there, things got distinctly less probable. While Stokes came in with the score a moderately healthy 141-3, he was also there when it became 286-9. This moment is worth emphasising. If you need 73 to win and number 11’s at the crease, it’s fair to consider victory pretty damn improbable. What really elevates this innings above the 2019 World Cup final effort is that distinction. There were points when even the merest whiff of possibility was hard to discern.

Rating: 10

JEOPARDY: England’s chances were pretty deeply intwined with the fate of Ben Stokes from early on: if he’d got out, their chances would have dimished enormously. But then we got to nine wickets down, where if either Stokes or Jack Leach had got out, England’s chances wouldn’t have just diminished, they’d have gone. Completely gone.

And then they stayed at that point for 10 overs with everyone’s emotional investment growing throughout. Every ball, it could have been all over. Every single ball. A full hour where an impossibly rare opportunity for the most memorable victory was entirely at stake and completely at risk, every… single… ball.

The purest example of the level of jeopardy was the BBC commentary we used to begin another of our features: What Ben Stokes, Jack Leach and Headingley 2019 tell us about Test cricket. “It’s six or out… It’s six,” said Jonathan Agnew. With the ball in the air, there were just two possible outcomes: six vital runs or complete failure.

But even this moment overlooks the most vital element of jeopardy – fallibility. It is one thing for the fate of a match to entirely hinge on Ben Stokes not getting out in the next hour. It is quite another for the same thing to entirely hinge on Jack Leach not getting out. That level of fragility – to have the whole outcome of a game in the hands of the very person deemed least qualified to handle the situation – is why cricket can at times be the most exciting sport of all.

We never said these ratings were out of 10.

Rating: 20

COMEDY: Headingley 2019 can’t in all honesty match the 2019 World Cup final in this sphere, but that isn’t to say it doesn’t have solid comedy credentials all the same. Getting out to a shit shot for eight in the first innings and then doing this in the second innings is pretty damn funny. Making three runs off 72 balls and then 132 off 147 balls is pretty damn funny. Six or out is pretty damn funny. A 76-run partnership in which Leach contributed a single run is pretty damn funny.

What else? Nathan Lyon missing a run-out with two needed for the win: very funny. An LBW appeal a ball later that would have been given if Australia had any reviews left: very, very funny. Hell, take a step back and the sheer gall of going out and delivering this run chase is pretty damn funny in itself.

Rating: 10

TOTAL: 79

Results

1. Headingley Test: 79
2. 2019 World Cup final: 69
3. 2022 T20 World Cup final: 32.5

Ben Stokes’ monstrously ludicrous and protracted 135 not out in the 3rd Ashes Test v Australia in August 2019 was the most ridiculous of his big three high pressure run-chase innings.

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“It could be really entertaining, like that 2005 series, which is what made me fall in love with cricket. The prospect of that is really exciting.” – Ollie Pope, February 2023.

Bless him, he’s excited. He’s also completely wrong.

The fundamental mistake that Ollie Pope has made here is a common one. The media, in particular, are very prone to making it. Newspapers get giddy with anticipation. TV coverage often misunderstands exactly why a series is exciting even while it’s happening.

Don’t get us wrong, the 2023 Ashes series could and indeed should be a very exciting one. Recent history suggests it has the potential to be the best since 2005 – although a lot of things will need to fall a certain way for that to happen.

It definitely won’t match 2005 though. We’re sure of that and now we’re going to explain why.

When did the 2005 Ashes begin?

The 2005 Ashes literally began on July 21, 2005 at Lord’s. The story started before then though. Surely few would dispute that the limited overs series that preceded it were a key part of that summer’s cricket-watching experience.

Remember Simon Jones confronting Matthew Hayden in the T20 game or Paul Collingwood leaping like a crested salmon to catch him out a short while later?

Those were massive 2005 Ashes events that didn’t actually take place during the Test series. This was when we first got a sense that England’s run of success had now translated into belief that they could finally beat Australia.

But even those moments wouldn’t have meant all that much if Matthew Hayden wasn’t already Matthew Hayden, the guff-talking flat track bully and barbed thorn in England’s side.

This is the thing: It is the characters and their history who make the drama.

We don’t mean history-history. We don’t mean all the way back to 1882 Ashes history. We mean the players taking part in the series you’re watching and what you already know about them. The current players are the ones who give proceedings real emotional heft.

And that’s why the 2005 Ashes is unfortunately almost impossible to beat.

Who played the 2005 Ashes?

For most England fans, the 2005 Ashes began in 1993 because that’s when we met our first character.

And honestly, what a character. And what an entrance.

Because cricket is so dramatically rich that even its back stories have back stories, Australia had already won two Ashes series on the bounce when Shane Warne turned up. He then played a pretty big part in them winning the next six.

If you were an England fan, those years saw the arrival of a few other powerful antagonists as well.

To name just a couple, there was Ricky Ponting, the bad-tempered batting machine who made his first Test hundred against England in 1997 after arriving at the crease with the score reading 50-4, and there was Jason Gillespie, who took 7-37 in England’s first innings in the same match.

The 2005 Ashes resulted in some people now remembering Gillespie as a slightly hapless, ineffectual medium-pacer with crap hair who got a heart-warming consolatory fairytale double hundred against Bangladesh. That is completely wrong. He was actually a guy who bowled 90mph away swing who cut England so many new ones they could have started a sphincter exportation business such was the surplus.

Ponting and Gillespie were typical of the Australia cast list England were up against in 2005. This was a side who could plop one of the most consistently destructive batters the world has ever seen in at number seven, like it was no big thing.

The action

The 2005 Ashes wasn’t exciting because England’s top order collapsed and then Kevin Pietersen hit a bowler back over his head for six. It was exciting because he did it to Glenn McGrath, the grumpy totem pole who bowled England out for 77 in 1997 and who dismissed Mike Atherton 19 times in 17 Tests.

Every moment was awash with this stuff.

Steve Harmison ran in to bowl that very first ball not to Justin Langer, but to Justin Langer, the man who batted the whole of the first day of the 2002 Melbourne Test on his way to 250.

Andrew Flintoff didn’t castle Adam Gilchrist. He castled Adam Gilchrist, who in his very first Ashes innings arrived at the crease with Australia 336-5 and bullied England’s bowlers for 152 off 143 balls.

The 2023 Ashes

If England’s recent performances are anything to go by, the action this summer could well be excellent. And there are of course great cricketers involved. But it’s not the same.

Australia have the likes of Steve Smith and David Warner, who can certainly do a job as cartoon villains, but you’d be hard pressed to muster much vitriol for players like Pat Cummins or Usman Khawaja. Who else? Alex Carey? Travis Head? Meh.

The balance isn’t the same anyway. The power of 2005 was because it was an underdog story. These days England have James Anderson, Stuart Broad, Ben Stokes and Joe Root and Australia haven’t won in England since 2001. It’s a wholly different dynamic.

It’s a mistake to think that the 2005 series was about the cut and thrust of the five matches. Its impact was fundamentally borne of Australia winning eight series in a row.

That’s the hole that cannot be filled here. We may get a really great Ashes series in 2023, but we can’t have another 2005 until one team or the other has first spent 16 years getting relentlessly pummelled by an evil superteam.

If you’ve read this far, you might want to check out some of our other features. You may also want to find out about our Patreon campaign and how the absolute solid gold legends who are contributing to it are making all this sort of stuff possible. Here’s the lowdown on that.

There aren’t many things in cricket more entertaining than a duck. A batter slowly walks out to try and make some runs and then slowly walks back again having failed to do so. It’s a miniature tragedy.

Great ducks come in many different flavours. There’s the duck you were expecting and the sheer delight (or frustration) of having that expectation met. At the opposite end of the scale, there’s the duck that comes when you were anticipating anything but a duck. The unexpected finality of such a moment provides an adrenal shock, like when a massive star is killed off in the opening scene of a film. Donald Bradman’s final innings is probably the best cricket example. (The Rock and Samuel L Jackson failing to last 15 minutes in The Other Guys is our favourite film example, even if it probably doesn’t exactly qualify.)

Between those extremes, you’ve got all manner of quirky ducks that can be elevated by the context or the manner in which they were achieved. A couple of examples: in 2021, Jasprit Bumrah was run out without facing a ball against England, and in 1999 Shahid Afridi made two golden ducks on the bounce, one against India and one against Sri Lanka. Afridi’s was by no means a unique feat, but it was very on-brand.

For this article, we’ve picked out eight players for their sterling contributions in the field of duck-scoring.

1. Muttiah Muralitharan, Sri Lanka

Murali has famously taken more Test wickets than anyone else. 14 golden ducks in 164 innings also means he’s the golden duckiest Test batter there’s ever been.

As Test duck-makers go, Murali wasn’t blessed with the same lack-of-skill as some of his rivals. His number 11 superpower was teaming the batting incompetence he had with absolutely zero judgement about what he should or shouldn’t have a ruddy great heave at. This pretty much mindless approach and his refusal to temper it even slightly, even after 400 international matches meant that for a good long while Murali was our favourite batter.

• Remembering Murali at the Oval in 98: The match when a true one-off revealed the awe-inspiring extent of his powers

Another player worthy of mention in the field of golden duck scoring is Sam Curran, who at the time of writing has managed six in 38 innings. This means that Curran, who generally tries to pass himself off as an all-rounder, has been out first ball a colossal 15.79% of the time.

2. Courtney Walsh, West Indies

If we’re talking plain old, take your time, no rush ducks, Courtney Walsh is of course the king with no fewer than 43 in 185 innings.

That is a hell of a lot of being dismissed without scoring.

3. Stuart Broad, England

Not far behind Walsh and still with a chance of passing him is Stuart Broad with 39 ducks in 232 innings. Broad earns special mention not just for having taken Murali’s approach to batting and built on it to become the greatest batter of all time, but for securing the most ducks while also having at least one hundred to your name.

• Is Stuart Broad the most annoying cricketer there’s ever been?

4. Chris Martin, New Zealand

For sheer duck density, it’s hard to look past Chris Martin who managed 36 in 104 innings, including a world record seven pairs. (No-one else has managed more than four.)

Martin was such an unutterably bad batter than he appeared in our list of Test cricketers who were the biggest burdens to their sides despite being an extremely good bowler.

Those who saw him bat may in fact wonder how he managed to avoid making a duck in the other 68 Test innings. Well, there were 28 nought not outs for a start. We were also struck by the suspiciously large number of four not outs (nine) which seem to suggest the edge down to third man was his most productive scoring shot.

5. Mervyn Dillon, West Indies

Brace yourself here, but the West Indies’ Mervyn Dillon was actually dismissed for a duck even more reliably than Chris Martin. He managed 26 in 68 innings.

There was however one pretty major difference between Dillon and Martin. Once Dillon got in – which is to say on the occasions when he wasn’t dismissed for exactly bugger all – he had a surprising tendency to go big.

By ‘go big’, we mean that on 14 occasions he made 19 runs or more. (We’d normally have a 20-run threshold here, but we were struck that Dillon made 19 on three occasions and 19 seemed a sizeable enough knock to qualify as ‘big’ in the context of an article about ducks.)  

6. Wavell Hinds, West Indies

One of Dillon’s golden ducks came in the 2000 Boxing Day Test against Australia and it wasn’t even close to being the worst innings of the match.

In the West Indies’ first innings, Wavell Hinds, batting at number three, was dismissed for a 10-ball duck. Nothing too remarkable about that, except that he was also dropped twice. We’re sure there have been other occasions when that’s happened to a batter, but given his batting position and the occasion, Hinds’ effort must surely rank pretty high on a list of the worst Test innings of all time.

7. Marvan Atapattu, Sri Lanka

A duck from a batter is so much more powerful than one from a number 11. So let’s move on to Marvan Atapattu, who made 22 ducks in 156 innings and also 16 hundreds, six of which were doubles.  

Steve Waugh actually made the same number of ducks, but it took him 260 innings. Waugh also didn’t deliver them with anywhere near as much panache.

Because if there’s one fact everyone should know about Marvan Atapattu, it’s how he began his Test career.

Atapattu made his debut against India in 1990 and began with a pair. In his next Test innings, against Australia in 1992, he made a third duck – a golden one to be precise. While a single in the second innings of that match must have been a weight off his mind, he nevertheless served up another pair in his third Test, against India in 1994.

Six innings into his Test career, Atapattu – a specialist batter – had five ducks and a 1 to his name.

(Irrelevant fact, but Atapattu is also one of only two players to have retired out in a Test match, along with Mahela Jayawardene, who did it in the same Test against Bangladesh in 2001.)

Ajit Agarkar, India

Ajit Agarkar – one of the worst batters ever to have hit a Test ton – once made five ducks in a row. While Atapattu’s effort is funnier because (a) he was a batter and (b) this was how he began a long and successful Test career in which he made over 5,000 runs at an average of almost 40, Agarkar does get a good few points for managing four golden ducks in a row to kick off that sequence.

You know you’re going some when a two-ball duck is an improvement on all of your previous four innings.

Agarkar’s incredible run of form only really came to an end because he left Australia and got to play against someone else. Incredibly, the next time he faced the Aussies, a year later, he made a pair.

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Our annual Lord Megachief of Gold award is the highest honour in cricket. The title is recognition of performance over the previous calendar year. Here are all the winners.

Up until now we’ve always recognised players for their batting or their bowling or both. This year, something else has swayed us.

This is a bit tough on Babar Azam, who couldn’t have done a great deal more. Four Test hundreds and an average of 69.64; three ODI hundreds and an average of 84.87; and a T20 hundred too.

But Babar was also the losing captain in a T20 World Cup final and for a three-Test series at home against England.

Lord Megachief of Gold

Ben Stokes then. A man who can bat, bowl and take 82 per cent amazing catches, but who has achieved the highest honour in cricket this year for precisely none of those things. He is instead being named Lord Megachief of Gold for captaincy, or rather for taking a sad, dead bird’s carcass and restoring it to life with a couple of bonus superpowers for good measure.

We may as well recap the playing contributions first though. There was a hundred in the Caribbean and then a 173-run partnership with Ben Foakes against South Africa that turned 147-5 into an innings victory when England were one Test down.

While there was nothing too remarkable with the ball, he did keep his Test averages the right way round across the calendar year – 870 runs at 36.25 versus 26 wickets at 31.19.

Oh and he was also the top scorer in a T20 World Cup final. If we’re saying he only had an okay year, it was the very top end of only okay.

And now to the other stuff.

Captaincy

An awful lot has been written about exactly what England have done since Ben Stokes became captain. But you actually can’t really gauge that properly without first revisiting what the team had become leading up to his tenure.

This year’s achievements are one thing. What’s more remarkable is that they didn’t arise from a baseline of competence. England have leapfrogged adequacy, hopping from deathly underperformance straight to rewriting what may or not be possible. Even if we discover more of this side’s limits and frailties in the coming year – and we surely will – that transformation did happen. It’s not really about the team’s ‘feats’. It’s about wresting the team from awfulness and instantly flinging them at least some distance in the opposite direction.

We spent the first half of 2022 angry with the England Test team and the second half amazed with it. Angry to amazed with just a change of captain (and coach).

So before we get to Stokes’ 10 Tests in charge (nine wins), let’s first look at the previous 10 (one win).

Right-arm fast-medium and batting collapses

The pre-Stokes captaincy period we’re looking at here comprises a win and then a loss against India, four defeats and a draw in the Ashes, and then two draws and a defeat in the West Indies.

Those are the basic results, but let’s recall how they came about as well. The two main themes were batting collapses and wilfully samey and unexciting bowling attacks.

The second Test of this period, a 157-run loss to India at the Oval, was a fine example. With the ball, England went with James Anderson, Ollie Robinson, Chris Woakes and Craig Overton – all right-arm fast-medium seamers – plus Moeen Ali. With the bat, they fell to 62-5 in their first innings.

The next Test was the first of the Ashes and to mark the occasion they went two runs better, collapsing to 60-5 on day one. They then went into the second Test with no fewer than five right-arm fast-medium bowlers and no spinner. They managed a whopping 85 runs before the fall of the fifth wicket in their second innings, which started to feel like a high water mark when they were bowled out for 68 in the third Test.

By this point, England looked burned-out, mediocre and sick of cricket, yet somehow they saved the fourth Test, even after being 36-4. They also picked a spinner – which wasn’t the case for the fifth Test. They were 85-5 in the first innings of that one and all out for 124 in the second.

And then it was on to the West Indies, where any tiny shreds of joy and goodwill were incinerated with the dropping of James Anderson and Stuart Broad in a myopic bid to engineer something that looked like a fresh start. Draws in the first two Tests were followed by a match in which they fell to 67-7 in the first innings and 97-7 in the second.

That’s where they were when Ben Stokes was named Test captain.

The Stokes era

England won their next four Tests. And how.

Having been just about the collapsiest team in Test history, they chased over 250 four times in a row while scoring at about five runs an over. Jonny Bairstow’s innings against New Zealand at Trent Bridge in particular was a truly incredible thing.

While these feats could partly be ascribed to a slightly duff batch of balls, it was pretty obvious that the team was also now being run in a very different way.

Anderson and Broad were not just back but embiggened. Jack Leach was given a full-time job too instead of the shaky zero hours contract he had been on. Leach wouldn’t be omitted from the team again all year – a vote of confidence in him but also in spin bowling more generally. Stokes would show similar faith in Rehan Ahmed later in the year, even going so far as to bat him at three when he felt the wind was at the teenager’s back.

It’s unkind to do a Captain Stokes v Captain Root head-to-head, but things were unarguably cheerier too. Players felt wanted, supported and secure. Stokes didn’t just say he thought a player was great before leaving them out of the next game. For the most part he tended to stick with them.

He also demonstrated that he would support positive batting in the face of any mistakes by going completely overboard and making boatloads of batting mistakes himself. His often irresponsible approach was leadership by example. He knew that no-one was going to deliberately copy his errors. It was a self-sacrificial attempt to raise the ceiling of what was permissible under his captaincy. He figured that even if the change in mentality brought a few more misguided slogs, it would eradicate a greater number of equally suicidal uncertain prods. As that Bairstow innings and 500 in a day proved, more can be achieved by batting with freedom and conviction than by second-guessing yourself and trying to avoid doing the wrong thing.

Stokes’ one defeat as captain came in the first Test against South Africa. However, his team responded with an innings victory and then a nine wicket win before positively rollocking their way through three Tests in Pakistan. They won them all, despite not having played Test cricket there since Rehan Ahmed was in nappies.

This year may or may not see the same success, but that’s not really the point. The point is this: Immediately before Ben Stokes became captain, following the England Test team was incredibly unfun. Since he became captain – regardless of results – it has been incredibly fun.

Congratulations, Ben Stokes, you are 2022’s Lord Megachief of Gold.

Lord Megachiefs of Gold

• 2007: Shivnarine Chanderpaul
• 2008: Shivnarine Chanderpaul
• 2009: MS Dhoni
• 2010: Dale Steyn
• 2011: Ian Bell
• 2012: Michael Clarke
• 2013: Dale Steyn
• 2014: Brendon McCullum and Angelo Mathews
• 2015: Kane Williamson
• 2016: R Ashwin
• 2017: James Anderson
• 2018: Jason Holder
• 2019: Neil Wagner
• 2020: Postponed
• 2020/21: Kane Williamson

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Last week Rehan Ahmed became England’s youngest debutant and soon after the youngest men’s Test debutant to take a five-wicket haul. But just how young is he really? Age is famously just a number (in this case 18), so maybe we can get a clearer perspective on his youth by listing a few things that are older than him for comparison.

In the comments section of our last article, Ged Ladd said he had been thinking about the “many garments” he had which were older than Rehan Ahmed.

So let’s start with that.

1. Ged’s cricket troos

Ged didn’t actually give us the birth year for these cricket trousers – maybe he can enlighten us in the comments. He says he does still wear them though.

We’re struck that they don’t look comically old, which is an alarmingly good measure of Ahmed’s age. We don’t look at these trousers and think, “I bet there are international cricketers younger than those trousers.”

2. Nasser Hussain’s England captaincy

We know Nasser has been a commentator for a good few years now, but it’s still faintly alarming to think that Rehan Ahmed wasn’t even born when he was England captain.

Rehan missed Rob Key’s 221 against the West Indies as well, the poor bastard.

3. Bad Boys 2

Back in the days of long play VHS, one of our housemates had a single tape with Speed, Species and Bad Boys on it. Quite the hat trick, we’re sure you’ll agree. One time we all watched the tape from start to finish and then when it reached the end and automatically rewound, we pressed play again.

That was obviously a long time ago. Bad Boys 2 came out eight years after Bad Boys though, at which point Rehan Ahmed still hadn’t got round to being born. (We still haven’t seen Bad Boys 2 and probably/hopefully never will.)

4. Get Busy by Sean Paul

Absolutely true. Sean Paul was getting jiggy and crunked up before Rehan Ahmed was even born.

Obviously there are quite a lot of songs we could have chosen here. (Most of the songs really, when you think about it.) We went for a Sean Paul one though because of something he said last week.

Sean Paul quite often says “Sean da Paul” at the start of his songs and as you’d imagine, a great many cricket fans – including Cricinfo’s Vithushan Ehantharajah – can’t help but hear it as “Chanderpaul”.

Turns out that’s exactly what he’s saying. There’s a very clear example here.

Bonus Sean Paul fact: He played for the Jamaica water polo team from the age of 13 to 21.

5. Call of Duty

We’ve never played Call of Duty. In our head, we’ve always explained this away as being because it’s a “new” game, so we were slightly taken aback to learn that a whole England leg-spinning all-rounder had been grown since it first came out.

We suppose Call of Duty probably became a more prominent thing in later incarnations as online gaming took off. Our only experience of playing a first person shooter online was Goldeneye 007 during an evening exploring Belgian beers with a friend. There was a lot of materialising and then being instantly shot in the head by teenage Americans who then swore at you in an annoying teenage American way. It’s not an experience we’re keen to repeat.

If you want a cricket game that came out BRA (before Rehan Ahmed) then what about this…

6. EA Cricket 2004

It’s easy to find just the right cricket game older than Rehan Ahmed because between 1995 and 2007, EA Sports released eight versions of theirs, naming each of them by year. We’re not even sure ‘EA’ is technically part of the title. It was like an exercise in devising the least googleable name possible.

One review described Cricket 2004 as, “a game that has been continually pumped out on a yearly basis with virtually zero improvements upon its previous incarnations.” There were two more instalments after this one.

In a 2012 article looking at computer game graphics through the years, IGN awarded Cricket 2004, “worst visuals”. Here’s a whole thing we did about computer game graphics through the ages, if you’re interested in that kind of thing.

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Is Test cricket dying because it’s unsuited to modern life? Or is it being allowed to die because it’s harder to monetise?

Doom-mongering administrators often talk like the world’s moved on from Test cricket. They say no-one’s interested any more and nothing can be done to save the format. They say they’ll do what they can for the patient, but the sad fact is a five-day cricket match doesn’t fit into modern life.

This is misleading and ignorant. The only question is whether or not they know it.

Do you know what a TRP is? Be thankful if you don’t. It is the kind of thing it is better not to know. We’re going to explain what a TRP is in a second, but please try and expunge the meaning from your brain once you’ve finished reading the article because if you ever find yourself talking about TRPs, you’ve definitely taken a wrong turn in life.

A TRP is a ‘target rating point’. It’s a marketing term. It means the percentage of your target audience that you actually reached through a given communication medium.

In 2019, ICC chairman Shashank Manohar confidently stated that, “Test cricket is actually dying.”

To justify that position, he said: “If you look at the TRPs of the broadcasters, T20 has the maximum TRP. It is because of being the shorter version of the game. Nowadays, people don’t have five days to watch a Test match. From 10 to 5 everybody has their own job, it is very difficult for them to watch this game. T20s get over in three-and-a-half hours, like watching a movie. Therefore, it is picking up very fast.”

Okay, there’s a few things to pick up on here.

Firstly, and most importantly, “10 to 5” – what the hell is that? Do you honestly think those are standard working hours, Shashank? You’re ICC chairman. How about working a full day for once in your life?

Secondly, “nowadays” – are people really busier these days? People have always worked. People have always had family and friends. If people are busier now, they’re busy wasting all the extra free time that’s been generated by all the millions of labour-saving devices they possess.

Thirdly, the biggest error Manohar’s made here is that he’s equated a format’s popularity with how many people watch it on TV at any given moment during a match. And you know what? That’s completely wrong.

You can see why he thinks this. From Manohar’s perspective the success of the sport is measured by how much money it makes and currently how much money the sport makes pretty much hinges on what TV companies are willing to pay to broadcast it.

But that’s not an accurate measure of interest. That’s a very, very inaccurate measure of interest.

There’s an episode of the X-Files that’s about an alien who played baseball for the Roswell Grays in 1947.

Here’s an ad for it.

It’s not an especially good episode – it’s probably even a bad one – but it has a very important moment in it when Mulder’s reading some old scorecards.

“Reading the box scores, Scully. You’d like it,” he says. “It’s like the Pythagorean Theorem for jocks. It distils all the chaos and action of any game in the history of all baseball games into one tiny, perfect, rectangular sequence of numbers.

“I can look at this box and I can recreate exactly what happened on some sunny summer day back in 1947. It’s like the numbers talk to me, they comfort me. They tell me that even though lots of things can change, some things do remain the same. It’s…”

And then Scully says, “Boring,” because most people don’t appreciate the subtleties of the scorecard.

No-one’s measuring the target rating points of old cricket scorecards from 1947, but that doesn’t mean people aren’t still spending time poring over them.

People also spend a hell of a lot of time poring over new scorecards – generally online. This is probably the most fundamental way in which Test cricket is followed these days. Millions of people monitor Test match scorecards. It is just that this is a mode of consumption that is very hard to monetise.

And that’s not all.

It’s even harder for cricket to make money off people talking about Tests in the pub. It’s hard for it to make money off people talking about them online too. Even the little video snippets of boundaries and wickets that everyone shares on social media are worth a pittance compared to showing a match on TV.

All of this non-broadcast consumption applies to all cricket formats these days, but Test cricket lends itself to highlight snippets and general debate far more than the others simply because of its duration. Only a small proportion of a Test match’s total audience will be sitting and passively watching the action at any given moment. Plenty of people are still hooked though – it’s just that each of them has a much lower dollar value attached to them.

You can’t write one of these articles without at some point asking, ‘does cricket exist to make money or does it make money to exist?’ so let’s get that out of the way now. Much as we might like it to be the latter, administrators can’t ignore financial pressures. The best cricketers want to make a decent living and even if every last one of them felt the longest format was the most important, there’d come a tipping point for each of them – no-one’s playing for free.

But let’s be clear: none of this amounts to Test cricket failing to fit into modern life. This is not that at all. This is a failure to monetise a format that fits into modern life perfectly.

Do you know what dot-watching is? Dot-watching’s watching a dot move across a map.

It sounds dull, but when the dots represent the positions of different people and they’re involved in a very long race, it can become weirdly absorbing. It’s a misleading term though because you don’t generally just sit there and watch the dot move.

Dot-watching has become increasingly popular as a way of following endurance events, in particular ultra-distance bike races like the Transcontinental Race, the Tour Divide or GBDuro – races that typically involve riders travelling great distances, carrying all their own stuff.

These kinds of races last days or even weeks. Finishing is an achievement and you’re more likely to get overtaken while sleeping than on the road. Quite often riders are allowed to choose their own routes. In the Transcontinental, for example, these route decisions might see them travel through entirely different countries. Rider A might take the direct route over a mountain range, while Rider B might skirt round and go through the foothills.

This means that if you’re following the race, there’s a lot to ponder. You check the map, you see who’s stationary and who’s moving. You compare recent speeds, you look at terrain – and then you get into all their social media stuff.

An ultra-distance bike race is a series of stories. The dots are the starting point and then you delve in as deeply as you want to. As a sport, it’s fascinating, but you absolutely do not sit and watch it. You couldn’t – it’s literally an endurance challenge.

Test cricket is not like this. There are endurance elements, but the play itself is a lot more inherently watchable than a person endlessly pedalling a bicycle. There are similarities though.

There’s this idea that everything in the modern world has to be instant and fast. What many people don’t seem to realise is that you can instantly and quickly monitor slow-paced things.

Most cricket broadcasters have apps these days and some are a lot better than others. We’re slow on these things, so the first time we really got a sense of what was happening was during the 2017/18 Ashes Down Under when we got free access to BT Sport’s offering through our phone contract.

The BT app seemed like a good one. We’d wake up in the morning and the app would have the whole day’s play on it with boundaries and wickets tagged in the timeline. We’d slide around, watching whatever took our interest. We’d catch up with the match interactively, in our own way. Then maybe we’d read an article elsewhere, or see what people were arguing about on Twitter.

You can do a lot more than this nowadays. With apps like CricViz, you can delve deeper into the scorecard. You can investigate how much the ball has been swinging and seaming. You can see how accurate the bowlers have been or get a sense of how many false shots the batsmen have played.

Follow a game this way and Test cricket doesn’t feel slow and unsuited to modern lifestyles: it feels immediate and brilliantly adaptable. You have access to as much or as little information as you want.

At the exact same time, Test cricket can be an ambient thing, something you dip in and out of. You can keep track of the score at work; you can follow it ball-by-ball on your phone on the bus; you can half watch it and half not-watch it on the TV, looking up only when you hear a noise to watch the replay.

The only people who really, really absolutely have to devote great slabs of time to actively watching cricket are the people who are new to the game. While many of us can hear a radio commentator say that a full-pitched away-swinger’s been driven through the covers for four and instantly visualise it, if you’re new to cricket then that description is just a near-meaningless series of sounds. You learn the game by playing it and watching it and building all of that specific knowledge.

If you’ve already made that investment, Test cricket is perfect for a reduced attention span. You can talk over it. You can keep tabs on it in the pub. You can prat about on Facebook or scour Rightmove while it’s on in the background at home. Almost anything you’re doing, Test cricket can creep in and lurk alongside you, giving you a nudge whenever something significant happens.

Modern technology means that you can carry the story of a Test match with you wherever you go. You can keep track of developments almost effortlessly and then, when time allows, you can get instant gratification. You can arrive in the middle of a Test and gain access to two days’ of footage and data – you can actively catch up.

You don’t need patience. You don’t. You absolutely don’t. Test cricket can be instant and immediate but also deeply absorbing in a way few other forms of entertainment can.

There has never been a better time to follow Test cricket and there has never been a better sport to follow.

Whenever anyone says that Test cricket doesn’t fit into modern life, ask yourself what they really mean.

First published in March 2020.

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