As Ben retirement announcement was being made official at Trent Bridge on a blazing Sunday afternoon, the crowd stood up and started cheering. The England captain, at the top of his bowling mark, stopped for a moment, showed no reaction and charged in. And what resulted seemed surreal.A tiring Stokes induced a nick off New Zealand batter Zak Foulkes’ bat and the second slip Harry Brook completed a catch, the team celebrating as if there’s no tomorrow. The cheer across the ground turned into an eruption of emotion — a celebration of England’s greatest allrounder after Ian Botham and the best world cricket has seen since Jacques Kallis. Stokes was coming back from a one-match ban following a bar brawl in this Test match. On the morning of Day 4, he had told his teammates that this would be his last Test, saying “reasons can wait for another day”. Playing only one format, one felt Stokes was good enough for a few more years of Test cricket. But it wasn’t to be.Probably, this latest controversy was the last straw in a career that has had its share of troubles — he was once banned in 2017 after a bar brawl in Bristol. Injuries, too, had taken a severe toll on his body, Stokes was often forced to take breaks in the past few years. An all-format matchwinner, an ODI and T20 World Cup winner, scorer of one of the greatest Ashes centuries of all time, Stokes had achieved everything. But numbers can’t explain Stokes — the 35year-old was way more than that. He was an iconoclast, a player who could face fire with fire.His 135 against Australia at Headingley, taking his team to a miraculous one-wicket win will always be remembered as one of the greatest Test innings ever played. Playing with No. 11, the attack that he launched on Australia was a turning point for English cricket.
It wasn’t one-off. Every time England were in trouble, Stokes seemed to rise, be it during the ODI World Cup final win in Lord’s in 2019 or the 2022 T20 World Cup final triumph against Pakistan in Melbourne. Stokes was everywhere, guiding England through choppy waters.Brief scores: New Zealand 438 & 288/9 dec (D Mitchell 100*, R Ravindra 94, J Archer 4/53) vs England 354 & 103
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