10 Things # 59

GH with highlights of 1964, 1971 and all over the world

1/ Ben Stokes retired. Perhaps you heard.

2/ Even my optometrist asked me about it yesterday. What is there left to say, except that it still feels weird? England are ranked seventh in the World Test Championship, for which Stokes freely advertised his contempt, and eighth in one-day internationals, which he had forsaken. In some countries that would have created a mandate for change; yet somehow, in England, it remained Stokes’s decision to make, despite his age, ever-patchier fitness record, the diminishing returns of his batting, and the long slow fade of Bazball.

In some degree, given the value of all-rounders at even seventy per cent effectiveness, this is understandable; but the accompanying psychodrama grew ever more distracting, and the climax at Trent Bridge was a fiasco inside a shambles wrapped in a debacle. I could not imagine an Australian cricketer, however great, being so indulged. Still, maybe Pete is right: given the personalities and the culture, such an ending was inevitable. And as Jonathan Trott says in his autobiography: ‘It has to end badly. Otherwise it might not end at all.’

3/ Here at any rate is my favourite statistical table of the last week - inspired by the eclipse of Keir Starmer, the highest English Test run scorers and wickettakers of the respective British premierships. It’s somehow a little better than statistical coincidence. Hobbs, Barnes and Asquith; Sutcliffe, Tate and Baldwin; Cowdrey, Trueman and Macmillan; and, perhaps especially, Gower, Botham and Thatcher - all feel redolent of their eras.

Joe Root generously did for Starmer what he’d earlier done for Boris and Theresa May, but there may be no more perfect symmetry than Ollie Pope with the lettuce supremacy of Liz Truss.