Ben Stokes, until very recently captain of the England cricket team, isn’t playing in the second Test match of the series against New Zealand which starts at The Oval on Wednesday. His misdeed? Breaching the team’s midnight curfew at the Rex Rooms nightclub in Chelsea when celebrating victory in the first game.
Stokes’s new nickname should also capture the essence of the man
Let others argue about discipline, a captain’s duties, team culture and the stern machinery of something that calls itself ‘the Cricket Regulator’ (no, me neither). What troubles me is something much more fundamental. If English cricket really is serious about standards, then the clean-up has to start where standards have fallen furthest. So really the burning question is: why is one of the greatest cricketers that England has ever produced still being referred to as ‘Stokesy’?
He deserves better than this nothing nickname. The 35-year-old Stokes’s heroic deeds in recent years have been genuine ‘Boys’ Own’ stuff. His match-winning and series-saving innings of 135 not out at Headingley in 2019, for example, was hailed as ‘unequivocally the finest ever played for England’. He has already scored more than 7,000 runs and taken nearly 250 wickets for the national team. Hopefully there’s plenty more to come.
