The Fear of Living Dangerously

Thoughts on fearing Ben Stokes

Mostly, I think I’ll remember the fear.

I was there at Headingley in 2019. All four days of the Test. Every four years my partner Cat and I choose an Ashes Test in England to attend, and in 2019 we just happened to land on the Headingley Test.

We went as a family to the fourth day, our two boys - 15 and 12 (to use their given names) - very excited at what the day held in store. Australia were about to retain the Ashes and they’d get to see it. There were a few moments of concern through the early stages of the day’s play, but nothing that seemed to derail the inevitable.

We were in the family section, alongside a very pleasant English family who were similarly convinced of the inevitable and trying to not get too disheartened. “You never know,” we would condescendingly say to them, and they’d nod politely back, knowing that we did know. We all knew. England were doomed. Australia would win. The Ashes would be retained.

And then Stokes teed off. Which was also fun in its own way, but nothing really to worry about.

Until, of course, it was.

I think it was when Marcus Harris dropped Stokes that our eldest stormed off, too frustrated to watch any more. He went out the gates and soon discovered he wasn’t allowed back in, and so missed the end of the Test.

But of course he didn’t miss anything. The roar of the crowd as Stokes hit the final boundary told him everything he needed to know, even as the rest of us were on our feet, applauding something utterly stunning. My otherwise frail sense of patriotism is probably at its strongest during the Ashes, but it’s still not so bolstered that this mind-boggling performance from Stokes would fail to overwhelm it.

There was no real sense of fear that particular day. The fear would come later. No, the overwhelming sense that day was disbelief. Also, irritation. Not so much because of the result but because my main thought as I stood there, clapping, dumbstruck, was that I’d just sent a book off to the printers entitled ‘The 50 Greatest Matches in Australian Cricket’ - and it was already out of date.

Our eldest, by the way, has, to this day, no regrets about storming off. “It was shit,” is his post-teenage perspective. “They should have got him out.”

And it’s obviously true. They should have. But they didn’t.

I went back to the hotel room and penned that day’s instalment in my ongoing Ashes screenplay (a mad venture in which I reimagined the entire Ashes series as ongoing four page additions to a movie script - insanely, I somehow tricked myself into doing this three times). The crux of that day’s entry was that Stokes was a genuine imagination-capturing English hero, certain to be knighted and a shoo-in for any role in greater British society he wanted to claim, whether that be the next James Bond, the next Doctor Who or the next Hugh Grant.

Of course, none of Stokes’ heroics prevent him from being a figure of fun. As far back as 2017, he’d conjured enough absurd moments in his career that I felt justified in naming him the fourth funniest cricketer of all time. And this was before Bazball was even a gleam in Brendon McCullum’s sunnies.

If anything, Stokes’ epic history of comedy cricket moments made his moments of heroism even more stark in contrast. Or perhaps it was vice versa. Or both.

The ridiculousness of Bazball was countered in those early years by it actually working. His leadership in Pakistan where he conjured a 3-0 win by sheer force of personality was genuinely one of the greatest exhibitions of cricket captaincy I’ve ever seen. Just a few months earlier I’d been impressed by Australia winning the series 1-0 by basically treating it as one long fifteen-day Test, wearing down Pakistan via brutal attrition to claim the final Test on the final day. That had seemed a very sensible way to win a series on the lifeless Pakistan pitches.

Stokes had no interest in sensible ways of doing things. And so he just made batshit, timed to perfection declarations, intuited his way to inspired bowling changes, and allowed his batters to white ball their way to unfathomable targets. It was astonishing.

So much so that if you were an England cricket fan, I could completely understand why you’d be swept up in the Bazball cult that soon became the single most annoying aspect of the team and their style of play. They made Stuart Broad a Nighthawk, for goodness sake. By any measure, that’s a great thing to do.

Which brings us to the fear.

There’s a great quote in Die Hard 2 when John McClane, caught up in yet another piece of terrorist nonsense that requires him to run around singlehandedly performing feats of counter-mayhem, mutters to himself: “How can the same shit happen to the same guy twice?”

And so it came to pass in 2023.

We weren’t at Lord’s in 2023. Our chosen Test for that Ashes summer was Old Trafford in Manchester. So we did get to watch Australia retain the Ashes that time around, cackling in delight as the rain tumbled down and secured the draw, the urn and the refund for our expensive day five tickets.

But for the second Test at Lord’s, we were back in Australia, watching on television. We watched as Jonny Bairstow was stumped. We watched as Broad carried on like a goose in response (the Nightgoose?). We watched as the Lord’s members reminded us again why they always, always, always need to be held in ongoing contempt.

And then Stokes teed off. Again.

That’s the fear I’ll remember. I don’t know who, exactly, is John McClane in the analogy - whether it’s Ben Stokes, or the Australian bowlers, or us as viewers - but regardless of who gets to be Bruce Willis, the vibe remained the same: “How can the same shit happen to the same guy/guys/viewers twice?”.

And as Stokes launched his furious charge towards victory, one thought kept running through my head: This motherfucker is going to do it again.

The fear of him doing so was very real. Because just as Die Hard 2 is a far inferior version to the original, this Stokes blitz was also inferior to the Headingley one. And not just because I wasn’t witnessing it in person.

It was inferior because it was predicated on a sense of unjustified self-righteousness. For just as some cockamamie snow-covered airport was no substitute for the aesthetic purity of the Nakatomi Plaza, ill-targeted fury at Bairstow being a careless dope was no substitute for the purity of Stokes rectifying his team’s first innings failures with his Headingley heroics.

My patriotism may be feeble, but I did not want Australia to lose a Test because Ben Stokes went mad based on some wrongheaded sense of injustice. And yet, I was very much afraid that would be the case, and we would never hear the end of it.

“See, Australia? That’s what you get when you stump a batter who’s dozily wandered out of his crease. Let that be a lesson to you to respect the Spirit of Cricket and its noble principles of protecting England batters from their own carelessness.”

Ugh.

Fortunately, the cricketing gods (or Pat Cummins and Josh Hazlewood, as you might know them) agreed with me.

So rather than McClane triumphing a second time against impossible odds, he was instead shot to death by Kunta Kinte, ensuring his wife’s plane crashed into the dark snowy runway, killing everybody on board. (I think those were the stakes of Die Hard 2 - it’s been a long time since I’ve watched it.)

Or to put it in a way that doesn’t undermine the essential conceit of an entire action movie franchise, Cummins and Hazlewood kept a cool head, having learned their lessons from four years earlier. They stacked the field, bowled wide, and dismissed Stokes, allowing Australia to secure the Test and take a 2-0 Ashes lead, setting up the sodden Ashes retention I’d witness a few weeks later.

Still, I’ll always remember the fear of that hour or so of Stokes’ batting.

Happy retirement, Ben. Yippee-ki-yay.