I’m a theoretical cricketist. In theory, I love the game. Love the figures, the scores, love the way everything is analysed by the run, by the wicket, by the minute. It’s a statisticians dream sport. And although every other sport now measures how many drops of sweat each player produces per minute, in the first half/set/chukka because the computers are monitoring and recording everything, giving tennis and football matches much more useless information than we really need, cricket has always been a bit more ‘pencil and paper’. It’s always used these stats. They’re part of the scoring.

Yes, I love everything about cricket. Except watching it. I simply lack the patience to watch 5 days of anything. 5 hours would be a push. My attention span is measured in milliseconds. So I don’t watch much. I love the 2-minute hilights on the news reports. Half the wickets, a few sixes and a stunning catch. That’ll do; move on. Even one day cricket is about half a day too much.

But the cricket does captivate me. Especially when it moves from its normal appearance of ‘leisurely’ to 5th day of the test ‘manic’. And when it gets like that, with England playing, there has never been, in my lifetime, a captain like Ben Stokes. We’ve had Athertons and Brearlys and Jo Root and Colin fucking Cowdrey, but none can do what Stokesy does. Simply win a match, single-handedly, with his unique mixture of bat, ball and 100% commitment and inspiration.

When he thumped a guy outside a pub one night, somewhere up north, I thought, ‘yeah, another arrogant, stupid, ginger (sorry, Mark), tattooed, sporting thug’. But one year later he won us the World Cup. And became (quite literally because I use this word very sparingly) ‘a legend’. His performance in that final against New Zealand was just magical. And massively inspirational. He leads from the front.

So yesterday, with the match so finely balanced, once more England relied on the sheer brilliance of our ginger-haired thug to orchestrate an amazing win against India. Who, in case you’d never realised, take the game of cricket rather seriously. Probably because they are the best in the world. But not yesterday. Yesterday our Lord and captain, in the ‘11th hour’, brought on a bowler who had a broken finger. But with his other 9 he managed to deliver the final, fatal, and really slow blow.

Ben Stokes is 34. He’s had injury issues aplenty. But he brings everything he has to the job. Everything. And mustn’t ever be allowed to retire.

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx