< 1 minute read At one point in the afternoon session, Ben Stokes accidentally spat on his own shirt. You’d think this would be a low point, but he plucked off the deposit with no obvious display of emotion. Perhaps he knew that things were about to get significantly worse. Shortly after spraying a
Continue readingTag: Ben Stokes
The scope of Ben Stokes
2 minute read If you were to look at Ben Stokes purely as a batsman or purely as a bowler, you’d struggle to see what the fuss was about. Averages of 34.04 and 35.64 are still at this stage the wrong way round. Taken together, you begin to get a sense of his
Continue readingEveryone knows that hitting four successive sixes is hard, right?
2 minute read We’re just checking, only a great many people seem to be holding Ben Stokes entirely responsible for England’s defeat. Sometimes the player hitting the sixes has some sort of say in things too. Think of it like this: if you were a primitive human and you sent one of your
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Ian Botham and the statistical unit that is a cricketer’s career
2 minute read One guy played 25 Tests and finished with a batting average of 40.48 and a bowling average of 18.52. Another guy played the same number of Tests and averaged 23.45 with the bat and 42 with the ball. Name those cricketers. We’ll give you the answer at the end of
Continue readingRoot and Stokes – a certain chemistry
2 minute read Alchemy was when they used to try and turn base metals into gold. It was a load of cobblers. Tell you what isn’t a load of cobblers though – Joe Root and Ben Stokes batting together. Quite often when these two substances are combined, true magic happens. In this year’s
Continue readingWhy it’s time to drop Ben Stokes
2 minute read Ben Stokes makes things happen. Against South Africa in Cape Town on the second day, he made time distort such that England appeared to make 312 runs in just 38.5 overs. At one point the TV commentators were reduced to debating whether the ball had landed on the railway line
Continue readingBen Stokes hits the ball hard
< 1 minute read Ben Stokes greeted the second new ball as if it were a rampaging arcade machine and he were Kung Fury. After five balls with it, he was 16 runs better off. As ever, he had hit the ball hard. The ball knows when it’s been hit by Stokes. It will
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England unclear on whether or not Ben Stokes has been suffering ‘the wild shits’
< 1 minute read You’d think with all their well-paid medical staff they’d be able to distinguish between the wild shits and the common-or-garden variety, but it doesn’t seem to be the case. Alastair Cook said: “He’s had a 24-hour bug, he didn’t look very well yesterday apparently but he’s here now and we’ll
Continue readingBen Stokes makes things happen
< 1 minute read To which one can only say: who doesn’t make things happen? We just made a typo happen, for example. Shortly afterwards, we made a correction happen. A littler earlier, we made a cup of coffee happen. Jade Dernbach makes wide long hops happen. Shaun Marsh makes hard-handed edges to the
Continue readingBen Stokes out obstructing the field
< 1 minute read We haven’t seen this incident yet, but it appears to be big news. That happens whenever someone’s dismissed in a weird way and when there’s also a ‘should he have been given out?’ element, you effectively get two stories for the price of one. As far as we can tell,
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