Et Al Pics: Five Days of Stokes

Philip Brown bore witness

He was coming back.

After being suspended and missing a Test match for a late night in a Chelsea nightclub, England’s captain Ben Stokes was returning to his struggling Test team along with the invisible man Gus Atkinson. Both had been sanctioned for staying out past curfew time, but poor Gus was hardly ever mentioned, whereas his caption was the name on everyone’s lips for most of June. Now an important Test match in Nottingham beckoned. A decider in a three-Test series between England and the plucky New Zealanders.

I drove to Nottingham (125 miles each way if you’re wondering about distance) on the Monday for a training session just to see for myself that Ben Stokes really had returned. About six photographers attended waiting for any Stokes/McCullum combination photo. It felt a bit like they orchestrated a hug and a bit of back slapping and that evening I headed back to London with a few photographs captured. After an ICC Women’s T20 World Cup match, I returned to Nottingham, ready for the Test to begin.

Day One. As New Zealand’s Tom Latham and Devon Conway added 317 for the first New Zealand wicket, I was positioned at the pavilion end of the ground - that I was working for an agency left me no choice. The best Stokes image I captured was a fairly bog standard bowling photograph. Nothing out of the ordinary really, but there you are.

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