Three Went Out, Two Came Back

CP wonders about the one that didn't

“Like a selfie, ump?'“

The wrong one died.

Out of the administrator Rob Key, the coach Brendon McCullum, and the legendary player Ben Stokes. It is Stokes who has ultimately been the one to go.

The last three weeks have been a soap opera of speculation. We’ll never know exactly how the relationship between Stokes and his leadership colleagues, and between Stokes and the game of cricket, unravelled. But upon his retirement, the dots joined up.

The man who said after the Ashes that defeat had taken him to places he thought he’d been before but hadn’t, who arrived at Lord’s following a major facial injury and was widely considered to not be his right self, then landed himself in a major professional controversy, has decided he’d had enough. Coming back at Trent Bridge, he said in his pre-match duties that he wasn’t looking beyond this week. People were sick of speculation, and so it was largely let slide. Only for him to stay true to his implication. We spent three weeks trying to read between the lines, only for it to turn out the script had been in front of us all along.

The overwhelming emotion is sadness that one of England’s best ever cricketers has called it quits. But the momentary one is bemusement at how a great career ended in such bizarre fashion.