He’s survived anxiety and a bad-boy reputation. Now New Zealand-born Ben Stokes has turned around the fortunes of the England cricket team, he is being hailed as the country’s greatest player.
“You don’t really take in the crowd. It’s like a fuzz, 30, 40 yards away from you; just sort of there in the background. You take in what’s going on around you at close proximity.”
When Ben Stokes is out in the middle of a cricket pitch, smashing Australian bowlers deep into the stands, as he did at Lord’s this summer, he hardly hears the spectators going berserk because he is so focused on what he can detect from the chatter and body language of the fielders.
“You get these massive tells of how they are feeling by how they look. They’re very nervous about what’s going on right now. And I’m not. You get a sense, ‘You’re f***ing s****ing yourself here.’ It’s just little things that tell you that you are massively on top. It’s a case of, ‘I really need to take advantage of this moment right now because they are quite vulnerable.’ " That’s when he goes for the jugular.
I had been warned that Stokes, 32, can be an unpredictable interviewee who sometimes clams up. But today, sitting with a coffee, overlooking a putting green at Woburn Golf Club in Bedfordshire, where he is about to play a round with fellow investors in a new business venture, he is happy to chat. The mist has just lifted to reveal a glorious September morning and he has arrived full of the joys of golf, sauntering into the room clutching a sunhat, making an unnecessary introduction — “I’m Ben” — and ready to reflect: on the Ashes; on how he has led an extraordinary transformation of English cricket’s fortunes and revolutionised the way the game is played after enduring a dark period in his personal life; and on his ambitions, on and off the field, beyond next month’s World Cup.
His ginger thatch is slicked back on top and shaved at the sides, his beard neatly groomed. He wears a bracelet on the wrist of one lavishly tattooed Popeye arm and a classic gold watch — not super-blingy — on the other. And he’s smiling, relaxed, a few lines around his eyes creasing as he says, self-deprecatingly, that he can “get round” a golf course, but that strikers of massive sixes might be able to hit a golf ball well, but can lack something when it comes to determining its direction.
At one point he makes the sunny observation, “I’ve not experienced a bad day being England captain.” It is hard to square this Stokes, in love with cricket and life, with the stricken-looking man who described having “massive” panic attacks and being gripped by negative feelings about his sport in a revelatory documentary last year.
A little over two years ago, Stokes announced that he was taking an indefinite break from cricket to prioritise his mental health. Two weeks later he recorded the first of two interviews with the director Sam Mendes for the documentary Ben Stokes: Phoenix from the Ashes. In the film, Stokes looks shellshocked. He explains how he had called his manager at 6am one day while sitting on the bathroom floor of his hotel crying and struggling for breath. He described other panic attacks in a dry cleaners when approached for an autograph and when collecting one of his children from a party. It was not only the sport that had been mentally fatiguing, but a number of other issues that had been building up over a lengthy period, he said. He had been dealing with an injured finger and his adored father, Ged, a former rugby league footballer, had died at the end of 2020 after a long illness.
Stokes had also been processing the fallout from his involvement in a brawl outside a Bristol nightclub in 2017. He was charged with affray but said at his trial in 2018 he had been defending a gay couple who had been subjected to homophobic abuse. He was acquitted, but was charged by the England and Wales Cricket Board with bringing the game into disrepute. (He later accepted this charge and was fined £30,000.) In the documentary, he said he felt let down by quite a few people who “wear a suit”, seemingly a reference to some of the game’s administrators.
Stokes worked with a therapist and took anti-anxiety medication. Surgery on his finger also improved how he felt about cricket and he returned to playing in the winter of 2021. The following April he was appointed Test captain when Joe Root stood down. Brendon McCullum, the former New Zealand captain, was appointed head coach a few weeks later.
When the pair took over, England were in a desperate slump, having won just 1 of their previous 17 matches. Since then the team, which is essentially the same group of players, has won 13 out of 18, playing in an assertive, confident, fast-scoring, often very aggressive and dominant style. This has been dubbed “Bazball” after McCullum’s nickname, though both he and Stokes dislike the term. “I hate it. It’s a media name,” Stokes says with feeling.
Whatever you call it, it is highly entertaining to watch and mostly extremely effective. Mike Atherton, the Times’s chief cricket correspondent, regards Stokes as the most inspirational England captain he has seen and says the team are playing the most thrilling cricket of his lifetime.
Stokes is leading a side built in his image. He explains how McCullum, who experienced low periods in his playing days, enjoyed his cricket much more in the final years of his career. “When he was younger, he put so much pressure on himself to perform that he didn’t enjoy it as much. When he let rip with how he wanted to play he had so much more fun and his record was so much better.”
Stokes and McCullum have imported some of the swashbuckling, risky play of the T20 and 50-over one-day games into the five-day game. “We said, ‘Why don’t we change the mould around how Test cricket is thought about in our country and what people think Test cricket is.’ You don’t have to play the way that everyone thinks you should play to be successful. We just started afresh and went, ‘Lads, we’re going to go out and entertain the crowd.’ I want the people who pay money to watch us to enjoy the cricket, regardless if it’s been a good day for England or a bad day. How do we do that? The style we play is always looking like you’re having fun, because you’ve got kids watching you. I want that 10-year-old watching going, ‘This is what I want to do when I’m 20 years old, because that looks like such a good thing to be able to go out and do.’ "
Stokes emphasises entertainment over winning. After losing the first match of the recent Ashes series he spoke to the players. “I said to the group, ‘I don’t want this team to be remembered as an Ashes-winning team. I want this team to be a legacy team.’ If we win things along the way, great. But winning [is] not the overriding factor and desire. Because if we play cricket in the way we want to play, we know that no team,” he checks himself, “well, we know that teams are going to find it very, very hard to keep up with us because of how we take the game on.”
One of their aims is to reduce the pressure on players. “There’s always that pressure when you walk out to play. But we’re not putting any more on people’s shoulders.” They emphasise the importance of maintaining a perspective on what happens in any single game. “No matter what happens here, it won’t define you. You’re all good enough players because you’re in the England dressing room. Go out and show the world what your talent is and make sure you do it with a big smile on your face. That was the plan and thankfully it’s worked more times that not.”
Mike Brearley, the former England captain who is now a psychoanalyst, has a hypothesis that Bazball can be traced to both Stokes and McCullum suffering depression, and that their reaction to that and return to good mental health has had an infectious effect on those around them.
Has the hard stuff Stokes has come through in his life given him a new freedom? “I think it’s just having an understanding there’s sport and then there’s life as well,” he says. “You’ve got the bigger picture. When you have no influence on what’s going to happen, that’s the worst bit. But when it’s all done and dusted, you can’t change that. Learn from something that’s happened, but you can’t hold onto it because if you do that it’s just going to eat you up. You can never go back and change something that’s already happened.”
He believes he has a better comprehension of the difficulties players may be having. “When we’re off the cricket field, life continues for everyone. It’s having that understanding that people are going to have ups and downs. People are going to feel great one day, shit the next day. Being captain, it’s great to have that relatability.I think it’s having that compassion towards people, not only in sport but also away from sport.”
He was lauded for his candour in talking about his mental health problems in the film. “It was important to do that,” he says. He does not want to talk about his current mental state or treatment. But he compartmentalises different areas of his life and focuses on them fully, whether it is cricket, his business interests, family or just being on holiday. “It’s being able to switch between the different phases of what’s going on in your life at that moment. That’s what I’m doing. I’m not going to give 50 per cent to this, then 25 per cent to that and 25 per cent to the other. It’s 100 per cent.”
Stokes is described to me by someone who knows him well as having a highly developed sense of not wanting to let others down. “I’m fully aware that in sport you can let people down. You will fail. All I can do is try every day to do what I need to do. And I know that every player who goes out there and plays for England under my captaincy is trying to do something great every day. When they fail [you say], ‘Good effort, nice try, keep going.’ Part of sport, part of life is failing, and how you cope and how you move on from it is the most important thing. Wake up the next day after a failure and hopefully the sun is shining and you get another chance.” Is this why he has a phoenix tattooed on his forearm? “Yeah, exactly.”
If there had not been a deluge during the Old Trafford Test, England would probably have won that game and, eventually, the Ashes. The Australians know that, but how deep has Bazball burrowed into their team psyche? Some bold England ploys did not work on the face of it, such as Stokes’s decision to declare early in the first Test at Edgbaston while more runs could have been accrued. He wanted to make Australia bat for 20 minutes at the end of the day, but England did not take any wickets that evening and when Australia went on to win the match by a narrow margin, that early gambit was questioned. Defenders of the aggressive approach disagree, suggesting that the way Stokes surprised Australia was part of a longer-term strategy of demonstrating that England play on their terms. Bazball thus became a psychological weapon.
“What we have found is that the opposition speak a lot about what we do. We just sort of crack on and don’t really get caught up with it all. Whether or not it’s a psychological advantage, I’ve no idea. But teams seem to speak a lot about what we do these days rather than themselves.”
For all his guile as captain, Stokes is still first and foremost one of the greatest — some would say the greatest — of England all-rounders. Watching Stokes, with his heroic self-belief and superhuman, explosive power and swagger, dispatching a bowler in every direction or clonking a batsman on the head with a bouncer, is perhaps as close as we can get to seeing Achilles wielding his massive shield and spear on the Trojan plain.
His unbeaten 135 against Australia at Headingley in 2019 is regarded as perhaps the finest of all England Test innings. He and the spin bowler Jack Leach shared a last-wicket stand of 76 in a sudden-death drama in which the dogged Leach ensured his own place in cricketing folklore with an epic defensive display for just one run, while Stokes, by turns crafty and combative, accumulated the runs to give England an improbable victory.
If victory had been secured with his Lord’s innings this summer he might have eclipsed even that 2019 achievement. England’s position at Lord’s was hopeless, but his never-say-die innings, in which he hit nine sixes — the most in an Ashes innings — gave cause for hope of a miraculous victory, before he was out for 155 and England then capitulated.
The display of muscular, Trojan-obliterating hitting came after Jonny Bairstow was controversially stumped when he wandered out of his crease. The crowd was incensed and three members of the MCC were suspended for heckling Australian players in the Long Room.
However, Stokes plays down the idea that he had been fired up after the row. “It’s easy to say I switched gears because I was so angry that Jonny was given out in that way.” In fact, he says, he just decided he had to start scoring quickly because he was running out of batting partners.
As well as reading the body language of his opponents, he was making calculations about the wind and the slope of the pitch, so for two hours he almost exclusively attacked one side of the boundary. “There’s a lot of thought that goes into it.”
I’m intrigued to know what it feels like after a batting performance like that. Initially he is awash with adrenaline. “And then half an hour later absolutely exhausted. And half an hour later, I’m pissed,” he says, smiling.
Last year Stokes retired from one-day international cricket to reduce his workload. But after the Ashes he unretired himself so he can play in next month’s World Cup in India. England are defending the title they won in 2019 at Lord’s “by the barest of margins”, in the immortal words of New Zealand commentator Ian Smith. Stokes was man of the match and the prospect of trying to retain the trophy is “exciting”. After we meet, he limbers up for the tournament by breaking the record for an England batsman in a one-day international, scoring 182 runs in a victory over New Zealand at the Oval. As for how Bazball (as I don’t call it to his face) might be developed in future Tests, he is giving nothing away. “Who knows. We’ll keep plodding along.” Plodding seems unlikely, I say. “Limping along then.”
He has been limping literally with a knee injury that meant he bowled only a few overs all summer. “Just getting old. We’ll be all right.” There is a plan for the knee after the World Cup but he is vague.
“I’m in the latter part of my career, so there are obviously things I need to start thinking about. I won’t be able just to stop, because doing stuff is embedded in me. I don’t see myself when I finish playing not being involved in the game somehow. I’d love to go into coaching. And play golf as much as I can.”
Coaching children, like the youngsters at Cockermouth Cricket Club in Cumbria where he played as a boy, is not on the cards. “It takes a certain type of person to be able to coach children. I’ve got my own and I can’t do it.”
The riches of the Indian Premier League, his lucrative England contract and sponsorship deals have made him wealthy. He lives in a large house in Co Durham and is looking ahead to securing his financial future and building his business career.
With England fast bowlers Jofra Archer and Stuart Broad, who retired from cricket at the end of July, he set up an athlete entrepreneurial collective, 4CAST. This has now become part of the Players Fund, which promotes itself as the UK’s first athlete-led venture-capital fund. Other founders include Jos Buttler and the footballers Chris Smalling, Héctor Bellerín and Serge Gnabry.
The fund will invest primarily in sports tech, media, digital communities and smart commerce, and an athletes committee will work alongside professional investors. Stokes believes the two groups can complement each other. “You’ve got the ‘go with it and just see how things end up’ [approach] from the athlete side, because you get presented with so many different situations in sport you’ve got to find a way through. But then someone who’s more experienced in the field of investing or the business world can go, ‘OK, it’s not as simple as that.’ I think it is actually really interesting to see how it all works.”
That sportsmen can struggle to maintain their lifestyle once they stop playing is something of which he is acutely aware. “Live within your means as much as you possibly can, because you need to make sure that when the day comes where you’re not earning the money that you were when you were playing, you’ve looked after the money and that’s going to last you.
“You’ve got a wife and kids. When my kids are grown up and when they have kids will there be… not a legacy, but something? That’s obviously what you worry about. I need to make sure I’m doing as much as I can while I’m still relevant to benefit myself and the family when I’m 65 and in a wheelchair.”
He has been with Clare since he was 18 and they married in 2017. “We’ve been together for a very long time now. The way in which my life and career have progressed, Clare’s just used to it and understands it. Obviously it’s tough at times with all the time spent away. The kids still don’t like me going away. But it’s part and parcel of the life that I chose.”
They have a son, Layton, and a daughter, Libby, who is a very good dancer and cheerleader. “I obviously don’t want to blow smoke up my own daughter’s arse, but I’m amazed at some of the stuff she can do. She’s a serious athlete, incredible. My boy, I don’t know where he’s got his intelligence from. Definitely not me. Very smart boy.”
Ged Stokes, his father, was a New Zealand rugby league player and coach, who brought his family to England when he was appointed coach of Workington Town. Ben was 12. Is there anything of his father that he would like to pass on to his own children? “Just be polite. If my two kids grow up to be extremely polite to everyone around them, then I’ll be happy.”
Although sport is not war, he is careful to point out, he likens his approach to leading a platoon. “I’ll be the first one over [the top] if I’m leading you, because I’m not going to send you boys in there first to take a few bullets and then make my way through. I’ll be going out there and take them so you guys can get through. That’s something I can take into certain parts of leadership within sport. Obviously I don’t have bullets flying at me.”
He tries to avoid showing any disappointment in his team-mates in public. “If I do need to do that I’ll do it in the dressing room away from any cameras. It very, very rarely happens. Every now and again I will be like, ‘F***ing quiet, lads, sort it out.’ It’s very subtle things like, ‘Can we just perk it up a bit? We’re playing for England, lads, come on.’ "
I have been told by someone who knows him well that his team-mates love him but also respect his forcefulness. Might they occasionally be a little scared of him? “No. I don’t shout at anyone. I don’t tell anyone off.” His team-mates should be motivated by admiration for his captaincy “rather than fear and [thinking], ‘Shit, I need to do this.’ I wouldn’t do anything for anybody I didn’t respect. If someone’s being a dick, I will tell them to f*** off.” This is what he said to one of the “suits” who asked for a selfie with him after the World Cup triumph.
Stokes has little time for cricket officials he does not respect or for critics. His focus off the pitch, just as it is at the crease, is on those in his immediate proximity and he blocks out the wider cacophony.
“I only care about the people who are important to me, like friends and family and their opinion. They’re the ones who matter. If you’ve got an opinion about me, I’m not going to bother about it if you don’t have my phone number.”
Written by: Damian Whitworth
© The Times of London