Robert Craddock: Ben Stokes’ innings rates among the top five Test innings ever played
It’s hard to truly compare Ben Stokes’ innings to anything else because the game has not seen one quite like it and may never do so again, writes ROBERT CRADDOCK.
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When Australia lost an Ashes Test by three runs at the MCG in 1982 a heartbroken Jeff Thomson took five years to speak about it ... to anybody.
Thirty-seven years later he still can’t bring himself to discuss it with Allan Border, the batsman at the other end who watched Thommo recoil in horror as he edged Ian Botham to the slips for the final wicket, ending a 70-run last wicket stand.
The moral of the story, says Thommo, is that Ashes pain never truly dies, you just learn to live with the shot-put that drops into the bottom of your stomach when someone shows the highlights reel.
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Nathan Lyon, who missed a run out, Marcus Harris, who dropped a late catch, and Tim Paine and Pat Cummins, who fluffed a review, are somewhere in Leeds dealing with the pain of the could-have, should-have, might-have moments that can only be soothed with an Ashes victory in the closing two matches.
Lyon’s unfortunate missed run out of Jack Leach was a sliding doors moment.
In a perfect world it would have been a replay of the Adam Gilchrist run out against South Africa at Edgbaston in the 1999 World Cup where all the players rush to the centre wicket to form one celebratory mass of humanity as a famous photo that lives forever captures the madness of the moment.
Now that the world has drawn breath, the challenge is to decide where Ben Stokes’ sensational century sits in the 2357-match history of Test cricket.
London Telegraph correspondent Scyld Berry, who may have seen more Test matches than any man alive (around 430), solved some of the puzzle for us by declaring it the finest Test innings by an Englishman.
By stunning coincidence, the two historical gold studs it beat were both at Headingley, Graham Gooch’s 154 against the West Indies in 1991 and Ian Botham’s rampaging 149, which famously brought England back from the dead in 1981.
The difference here was the depth of pressure on Stokes in a fourth innings run chase.
With England facing the acute embarrassment of losing the Ashes three Tests into the series he somehow conjured up the greatest run chase in their Test history with a No.11 whose glasses kept fogging up. Extraordinary.
As stunning as Botham’s innings was, England were so far out of that game (officially 500-1) that he could swing with impunity and the hurricane lasted long enough to somehow blow Australia off their feet.
Stokes’ innings must surely rate in the top five ever played.
It’s in the company of the 281 slapped down by VVS Laxman in Kolkata when India had followed on and, like Stokes’ England, were all but out of the series against a world beating Australian side chasing their 17th successive Test victory.
For a “one man against the world’’ feel it stands with Brian Lara’s epic 153 not out against Australia in Barbados in when he arrived at 3-78 still 230 from the target and somehow saw his team home.
Don Bradman’s best work clogs the leaderboard, including another Headingley masterpiece – his 173 not out as a 40-year-old in 1948, when Australia chased down a victory target of 403.
But this much is certain.
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Not Bradman, Laxman, Lara or anyone could have contemplated scoring 76 off the last 10 overs for the last wicket, scooping Cummins with a ramp shot six or reverse sweeping Lyon high into the terraces when one false move would have given Australia the Ashes.
Stokes was part tortoise, part hare, part old-fashioned warrior, part modern showman, part cement, part desperation, part calculation.
It’s hard to truly compare this innings to anything else because the game has not seen one quite like it and may never do so again.
Originally published as Robert Craddock: Ben Stokes’ innings rates among the top five Test innings ever played