Different Stokes for Different Blokes

PL on conflicting accounts of Ben Stokes' disposition

Dutch all-rounder Vincent van Gogh

It is something of a relief, given the grim updates of a few days earlier, to receive reports from Chester-le-Street on Friday that nothing is amiss with Durham’s Ben Stokes, the carefree clubman who appears to be enjoying a sojourn back in first-class cricket.

Ben is Ben, his old mates tell us. “Absolutely fine,” Durham’s cricket chief claimed. There was nowhere he’d rather be than the Riverside ground on a Friday, wrote Luke Edwards, a reporter from the Telegraph whose usual beat is the football clubs of the north, but who had been dispatched to cover the second division county game, presumably because the cricket correspondents were required to attend the Test match down in London.

It does, however, lead to some confusion over the status of England’s Ben Stokes, who, it was intimated, was very much not feeling himself a few days earlier.

Both things can be true, and it is something of a delicate topic, but some examination is warranted given two sharply different renderings of Stokes’ disposition painted by two different team managers in the space of a few days.

As the outcry surrounding Stokes’ breach of a curfew following the first Test spread, Rob Key and Brendon McCullum struck a balance somewhere between stern and concern in their accounting of a situation that is inconvenient and embarrassing for them and their team. It is bad enough overseeing a group so derelict in its ways that it must have curfews imposed as if they were adolescents at a boarding school, quite another that it is your head boy, one of the draftees of the curfew’s imposition, who breaches it and has been placed on detention.

Stokes, who has remained silent amidst a locust plague of opinions flapping first this way and then that, returned to play for Durham on Friday instead of turning out for England in the second Test match against New Zealand at the Oval. Again, it was left to others to update us on the all-rounders’ mindset.

After some of the things said earlier in the week, it was some relief to hear Durham chief executive Tim Bostock’s take:

“It is just normal Ben,” Bostock told BBC Look North.

“I was a little bit bemused by some of the comments about his state of mind and maybe in the first 24 hours when this exploded, I am sure he was thinking, ‘What has happened here?’

“He has been absolutely fine. He is very positive and is always very positive.”