Posted by “Pain is just an emotion,” Ben Stokes told his men at Old Trafford – a nonsense claim just a few small steps below Dalton’s standard-setting “pain don’t hurt” in Road House.
For those that don’t know, Dalton is a world famous bouncer in a world where bouncers can be world famous; the kind of guy you’d travel across the country to hire if you’d bought an incredibly violent dive bar and now found yourself needing “the best” (or at least the second best after Wade Garrett because “Wade Garrett’s getting old”).
Michael Vaughan once told Wisden: “Road House taught me a lot.” We’re worried that Patrick Swayze’s character has become established as some sort of font of strategic wisdom at the ECB with his various pronouncements mandatory study material for every potential captain. (Vaughan apparently put great stock in Dalton’s instruction to his staff to “be nice”.)
At one point in Road House, Dalton gets stabbed in the arm and doesn’t even flinch. He does later have to go to hospital though.
Pain is not just an emotion. Pain signals damage.
Optional suffering
Sometimes pain is instantly significant (a stabbing, say). Other times it’s a strong hint that you should stop doing something because otherwise a small injury is liable to get an awful lot more severe.
No-one ever rallied the troops with sports science though. No-one ever revved themselves up by taking stock of their niggles and carefully assessing whether any of them were likely to result in serious harm.
And so it was that Ben Stokes persuaded himself to deliver a different kind of bouncer to his opposite number yesterday; to a man who is, in his own way, similarly battered and bruised. After being struck yet again, Shubman Gill shed his gloves to reveal hands that are by this point 90 per cent Elastoplast.
Gill continued to another hundred – his fourth of the series. It’s almost as if batting has become his great escape from captaincy, which often appears to inflict on him an even greater pain than that from his mangled fingers. Is this brand of self-care sustainable? Will he be driven to ever-greater feats of captaincy avoidance, perhaps culminating in five solid days of batting without a declaration?
> Shubman Gill seems only half angry about hitting Test hundreds
It’s a slightly different equation for Stokes, who habitually goes out of his way to convey to everyone just how much he loves captaincy. The danger in his case is that he doesn’t get to do the leadership bit because he’s cricketed himself into the ground.
Time for a short break
We all love Ben Stokes the all-rounder. We all love watching the batting and bowling show. It’s just that it’s becoming increasingly hard to ignore how frequently the programme’s being interrupted by breaks for niggles.
This seems an odd thing to say given he’s batting and bowling more than he has in years, but Stokes currently seems hell-bent on ping-ponging from one extreme to the other.
At Lord’s he suffered a groin problem and for a while it looked like he wouldn’t be able to bowl again. He then got through 24 overs in India’s second innings, hitting 90mph in the process.
He said he spent four days in bed after that, but then bowled another 24 overs in the very next innings, at Old Trafford. This led to the Ghost Of Hamstring Injuries Past flickering in and out of existence and he then suffered a cramp-induced off-field interval halfway through his hundred.
Stokes didn’t bowl at all the next day, but then returned with a new ailment – a sore biceps tendon – which he could be seen nursing between bouncers.
Stokes’ appetite for the game is hard to fault. He says he’ll play the fifth Test on Thursday (but only if they bin off Soul Limbo and let him write the theme tune, sing the theme tune).
Is he back to his best? Old Trafford was the first time he’s hit a hundred and taken a five-for in the same Test match, but the whinging body parts show why that is such a rare feat for anyone.
Garry Sobers was first to manage it twice and even he never achieved it again. Four other players have since matched Sobers: Mushtaq Mohammed, Jacques Kallis, Shakib al Hasan and Ravindra Jadeja.
Only two players have done this brand of double more often. R Ashwin had four such Tests, while Ian Botham managed it five times – most ludicrously at the Wankhede in 1980 when he followed 6-58 in India’s first innings with 7-48 in the second.
> What has been the most improbable feat by an England cricketer in India?
It’s worth pointing out that the last of Botham’s ton-and-five-wicket-haul combos came at the age of 28 – but then Beefy didn’t really look after himself the way Stokes does. Or indeed at all. Even during that Mumbai Test, he said he didn’t at any point go to bed before 4am.
You can’t do that forever. But then even with the best preparation in the world, you can only ever postpone the inevitable. No matter how strong we think we are, we all succumb to the pain eventually.
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I just typed ‘Is pain just an emotion?’ into Google.
The AI bot responds: ‘No, pain is not just an emotion. It is a complex experience with both sensory and emotional components. While pain can trigger emotional responses, the physical sensation of pain itself is a signal from the body that something is wrong. The International Association for the Study of Pain defines pain as “an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience”
Much like watching English cricket throughout the ’90s, then.
Pain don’t hurt.
‘Here comes the pain again/ Falling on my head like a memory/ Falling on my head like a new emotion’, as Annie Lennox almost sang.
Great piece, KC. It’s not the years, it’s the mileage.
Thanks Edwardian.
The thing with Stokes is that we are literally counting down the tests now – does anyone now doubt that however the result goes, he is retiring at the end of the this winter’s Ashes series? It really does feel like his mindset is can he somehow mentally drag his poor meat bag self through a home win against India and then one last stab at an away win against the Auld Enemy.
Ironically, considering the overall air of him dropping more bodywork parts than Herbie Goes Bananas every time he runs into bowl, he looks to be physically in the best condition of his career – he has clearly put serious fitness work in over the last year, and it is showing in his ability to both bounce back from injury and bowl at serious pace. That does mean he has a slightly gaunt look to him currently, and the less said about the whole annoying beard-hair disconnect thing going on…
Fantastic reference.
As someone who has recent, relevant experience of playing hard ball through pain, I ought to have something meaningful to say about this, but I am struggling a bit to condense my thoughts.
I don’t think that pain is JUST an emotion, but I do think that the sensation of pain is a subjective reality. However, the person who feels the pain only has control of some of the causes and consequences of the pain. A strong fella like Ben Stokes can adapt around many types of injury, to continue performing at a very high level for a while through the pain. But there are likely to be knock-on-effects and long term consequences from that adaptation.
Each person is different and each injury is different. Every person is complex, as are most injuries.
In other news, I played my first post-surgery “International” a couple of weeks ago. I slipped in one of my favourite King Cricket running gags at the end of my write up, which has cricket as well as tennis in it:
https://ianlouisharris.com/2025/07/15/mcc-v-real-tennis-hong-kong-a-rare-tennis-fixture-at-lords-15-july-2025/
Botham did it five times?!
I take it back Dad. Botham was the best all rounder. I’ll let you have that one.
We’ve written elsewhere that before he took on the captaincy, Beefy was shaping up to be not just one of the greatest players ever, but two of them – exceptional as both a batter and a bowler, not just getting by in one of those areas.
My only enduring memory of the 4th test match was the moment when Stokes tried to offer the draw (egged on by some of his team mates) cos’ he/they didn’t like the fact that two batsmen were both close to centuries, didn’t like the fact that the crowd (who paid to see the entertainment, and ultimately the players wages) were enjoying the event and were wanting the two batsmen to get their centuries, and didn’t like the fact that he/they couldn’t end the game on his/their terms. Was he/they really that selfish?
This is why, despite being the country of my birth and wotnot, I’m not an England cricket team fan, aside from Joe Root who seems (and I hope is) a good chap. There may be one or two others that are decent human beings, but… meh!
Apologies to everyone for the downer of a post. I type my mind on occasion.
Your point about petulant-handshake-gate reinforces my point about the unintended consequences of excessively playing through pain. At the very least it tends to make people grumpy and at worst it scrambles the brain.
The end of that test match was not a good look from the England team, but I think the incident is being hyped out of proportion by the cricket media, whose publicity oxygen has been severely depleted by the Lionesses. I certainly wouldn’t draw general and long-term conclusions about the merit of the current England set up from that incident.
England do tend to be judged by different…mostly higher…moral standards than most. Had an England manager behaved towards an overseas groundsman the way Gambhir and his coaching team behaved towards and subsequently spoke about Lee Fortis yesterday, it would no doubt have been billed as imperialism, colonialism and the like. No judgment on the spat intended, but statements along the lines of “he’s just a groundsman, we are highly skilled professionals” is not a good look.
Tempers can fray during a mouth-watering lay tense,, close test series. Who knew? I for one can hardly keep my eyes of it now.
T’is true Ged.
I don’t look at the press, so my comment is on what I saw and heard and not on what someone else said or wrote, but I can imagine the cricket press having a field day to stay relevant. It’s not the first time I’ve disapproved, and that goes for other teams as well.
It also an extension of my feelings of what’s going on in the world at the moment. While it is cowardly on my part, I just wish for a little ‘niceness’ to be shown, even in the smallest of arenas, just to avoid the seemingly perpetual horror of today’s reality, but for a moment.
I’ll behave next time 😉
Is it time to talk about Rehan Ahmed?
I know second division doesn’t count. But flipping heck.
And one of Matt Parkinson’s seven wickets. Is the second division the only level of English cricket where leggies are allowed?
Stokes about the biceps tendon injury, mentioned above, that is now keeping him out of the fifth Test…
“It’s one of those where the, um, you know… weighing up the risk-reward. And the risk was way too high for damaging this any further than it currently is.”
Wonder how much worse it got during those 11 overs he bowled after first sustaining the injury. Pain isn’t just an emotion.