Richard Mann reflects on a thrilling final day of the first Ashes Test at Edgbaston, where for the first time Ben Stokes' captaincy came under fire.
Everything is much easier with the benefit of hindsight, and criticism has now started to come Ben Stokes’ way after his day one declaration on 393/8 ultimately proved to be the wrong decision as Australia won the first Ashes Test at Edgbaston by two wickets. Had England batted on, with Joe Root at the time cruising on 118 not out, the hosts may well have scored enough runs to put Australia out of reach. Australia’s victory target of 281 would have likely been in the region of 300, or something even bigger. As it was, that target always felt within their grasp.
I wrote at the time that I was uneasy about the declaration, and in fairness, Kevin Pietersen – whose punditry is winning me over to such an extent I had to look at myself in the mirror over the weekend – landed straight on the nose when telling Ian Ward on Sky Sports at the time that he didn’t like it. ‘I was always taught big first innings runs. Get 400-450, if you can’. And England could have, had Stokes wanted to.
Instead, England's captain reckoned those 20 minutes he forced Australia to bat late on Friday – four overs to be precise – presented an opportunity to turn the game fully in his team's favour. With a well-oiled and hostile Edgbaston crowd behind him, if Stuart Broad could charge in and knock over David Warner and perhaps one other, it would mean England ended the first day of the series firmly on the front foot.
In theory, he was correct. Had England landed a couple of telling blows in that period, Stokes would have been hailed a genius. In 2012, Michael Clarke declared from behind in Bridgetown and Australia went on to win that particular Test match by three wickets. Clarke was lauded as a pioneer, an aggressive tactician who was changing the face of Test cricket by being prepared to risk losing, in order to increase his team’s chances of winning. Sound familiar?
Stokes isn’t so much reinventing the wheel. What he is doing is resolving to take the aggressive option to try and win games of cricket. With the players he has at his disposal, particularly in the batting department, it has proven to be the right approach.
But he doesn’t have everything he needs. He didn’t have Mark Wood’s express pace when he badly needed it on day five, nor Jofra Archer’s, and how he would love a world-class spinner to captain like his opposite number has in Nathan Lyon. As such, to take wickets on flat pitches, Stokes sometimes needs to create things out of nothing. His declaration was one such moment.
However, this is a results business. Stokes and Brendon McCullum will say it isn’t, and boy what wonderful, exhilarating sport they gave us for five glorious days in Birmingham, but England fans want to see England win the Ashes. And at the end of the summer, to a large degree, Stokes’ captaincy will be judged on the final result.
That’s the thing with captaincy. Hundreds of decisions will be made over the course of a Test match, many carefully considered and with sound merit. Some will work, many will not, while the occasional hunch that seems so hard for those watching to comprehend will hit the jackpot. Good calls will sometimes yield good results, and there will be times when poor tactics might just get plain lucky. It’s a fickle game and sports fans are fickle beasts.
I couldn’t for the life of me understand why James Anderson didn’t bowl at Pat Cummins and Nathan Lyon in the last session on Tuesday, particularly once the new ball had become available. Anderson was below his best in this match – only taking one wicket across two innings – but it’s worth remembering that he saw a couple of chances go begging off Jonny Bairstow. More importantly, this is England’s greatest ever bowler, the finest new-ball bowler of our generation. Rhythm or no rhythm, in the crunch moments, surely you back Anderson to deliver for his country, just as he has so many times before.
Stokes saw things differently to me, and to Ricky Ponting on Sky Sports who was imploring England to turn to Anderson. Would you substitute Harry Kane at 0-0 with 10 minutes remaining in a World Cup final? Or if the match went to penalties, would you take Kane off penalty duty because he had missed one earlier in the match? Of course not. You’d back your champion player to deliver when it mattered.
Broad – understandably so given how well he’d bowled across the match – and Robinson were preferred to Anderson as Stokes reckoned those two were better suited to the short-ball tactic that worked so well against Australia’s lower order in the first innings. The difference here was that England had a shiny new Dukes ball with Anderson’s name on it.
Was Stokes’ approach the right one, or did Ponting know better? The debate could go on and on, but it is Australia who now lead the Ashes, while England’s captain will reflect on a match of missed opportunities and tough decisions that he may wish he could take back. The first-day declaration will remain the biggest talking point, of course.
This doesn’t suddenly make Stokes a bad captain; far from it. But it serves as a stark reminder that captaincy is hard, and sport often cruel. Everything Stokes has touched so far in his captaincy reign has turned to gold, but that changed last week. There was absolute method in all of his apparent madness, but this time the cards didn’t fall his way and England lost a Test match they had bossed for large periods.
Things could be different again at Lord’s next week. The ebbs and flows of a five-match Ashes series are like no other, and fortunes are sure to keep changing over the course of the next six weeks in a clash between two very fine and evenly-matched sides.
But make no mistake, when this latest Ashes battle finishes come the end of July, Stokes will be judged on the final result much more than his aggressive nature and the exciting brand of cricket his team now plays. Perhaps his biggest challenge, then, will be to ignore the outside noise and stick to the approach that has brought him great success in the last 12 months. I’m not sure he knows any other way, but the fickle nature of the beast might for the first time have him asking a few questions of himself.