O Captain! My Captain!

Four swings took a World Cup. They also built the next ten years

Photo courtesy of YouTube.

Pretty sure I wasn’t an outlier on finding out about Ben Stokes’s retirement. It wasn’t a press conference or a carefully staged farewell tour, but it was kinda mid-over. The Trent Bridge crowd were brought to their feet as they applauded after the news started to spread like wildfire through social media.

Ben Stokes, however, was treating it like every other normal day as he walked back to his mark for the eleventh over of another marathon spell.

And then he took a wicket with the very next ball.

Of course he did. The stars were obviously aligned in his way. It was meant to be his moment. That was always the deal with him. You never get a quiet goodbye with a player like him.

You got one last impossible thing.

My dad broke the news to me as he read the commentator’s transcript on his phone. He and I were both shell-shocked. For me, it felt like the reset button had been slammed inside my head as I was recalling the last seven years I had known him as a cricketer.

But I was also remembering the story that I had been told of the Mighty Benjamin Andrew Stokes.

Ben Stokes wasn’t a cricketer I watched. He was a cricketer I needed. He was proof that a hopeless situation didn’t mean you were allowed to stop.

The numbers, and why they don’t matter

Let me get them out of the way from the very beginning itself, because they deserve to be said out loud, even if they miss the point entirely.

He recorded 122 Tests, 7,273 runs at 34.46. 252 wickets at 31.03. In his final match, at Trent Bridge, he became only the second man in the 149-year history of Test cricket to finish with 7,000 runs and 250 wickets. The other one?

Jacques Kallis. That’s the whole list. Two names.

But here’s one crucial detail that needs to be pointed out. If you have a look at the numbers, you’ll probably be wondering why the full cricketing world is in complete awe of him. I mean, his batting average is just 34. There are hundreds of Test cricketers with a better average than that.

Well, it’s because the average measures the mean and Stokesy loves living on the edge, playing with danger and risk.

Stokes has always lived at the edges. He has experienced almost everything one can experience in the sport, from a pitch with cracks wide enough to fit an iPhone to his team being 50 for 5, with the commentators already preparing notes for the end of the game.

Average is what happens when you convert a player into numbers. Stokes simply refused to be flattened by that.

Try averaging Headingley. Go on. I dare you. It comes out as one very good score.

The numbers say he was outstanding. The memories say he defied the laws of the sport.

2016: The night that broke and made him

Kolkata. World T20 Final. Four balls.

This is where I need to start the story, because everything else is the downstream of it.

It’s the last over of the match. Nineteen runs to defend. Stokes has the ball. Brathwaite has the bat. What happened in the next four balls cannot be described in simple words. It was six, six, six, six. Four swings. Four times it went past the boundary ropes and into the stands. The Eden Gardens crowd had erupted. A World Cup had been snatched.

Stokes was on his knees. He couldn’t believe what happened.

Most careers usually end like this. It’s very hard for a player to come back mentally from an experience like this. The clip was played forever. It was a nightmare of a loop.

But Stokes made it a beginning.

2019: Headingley

135 not out. One wicket left. 359 to chase. Jack Leach at the other end.

You know it. I know it. Everyone knows it. So I needn’t bother repeating each ball of this indescribable innings.

England were nine down, and I can give you a guarantee that every English fan had given up. Every English player had given up. Hold it. Every English player, except Stokes. He was the English knight in shining armor as he continued to take on the Aussie bowling attack that consisted of Cummins, Lyon, and Hazlewood.

He played an atrocious shot against Nathan Lyon as he reverse-swept him into the stands for a six. A reverse-sweep is optional, by the way, due to how risky a shot it is. But Stokes didn’t care. He had to take the risks.

On the other end of this crazy partnership was Jack Leach. He made only one run. One. He cleaned his glasses and became a national treasure. And Stokes hit Pat Cummins to the boundary through the covers, proceeding to scream at the sky as he had no business chasing that target down.

The Headingley miracle is a symbol of never giving up on things in life. If one is ever lost in a situation, they can pull their inner Stokes and repeat: “Yeah, but Headingley.”

Some innings win matches. That one rewired people.

2019: Lord’s, and the longest afternoon in English sport

The World Cup Final. 84 not out. A tie. A Super Over. Another tie.

Six weeks earlier, England had never won a 50-over World Cup. Not once. Not in forty-four years of trying.

Stokes must have gotten used to walking out in a crucial match while his side was crumbling. But he refused to give up, like always. He has the ability to drag his team single-handedly to the finish line. England had no right to still be alive in this contest. It went down to the last ball. Then the overthrow. Then the Super Over.

And who else would open for England in the Super Over? Who else was ever going to bat it?

Tie again. The trophy was decided on a boundary count. It was the most unforgettable and absurd finish in the history of sports, and Ben Stokes was the centerpiece of this spectacle.

Let’s put Kolkata alongside this. Three years. Three years between a man who was on his knees and weeping while standing in the outfield with a World Cup he’d let slip through four swings. This same man was now standing at Lord’s, on his knees again, but this time smiling with joy and the same thing in his hands.

Same field. Same posture. Opposite meaning.

That’s not a career. That’s a novel.

2022: Melbourne, and the debt he never owed

T20 World Cup Final. 52 not out off 49. The winning runs.

He didn’t owe anyone this. And that’s the part that gets me.

Kolkata wasn’t a debt. But people who didn’t understand the game just blamed him for Brathwaite’s merciless striking in the last over of the match with four consecutive sixes. It wasn’t bad balls. Unlucky, that’s it.

But he carried it anyway, the way people like him always do, and the cricketing universe decided to balance the scales.

So there he was standing in the middle at the MCG, England four down early in the run chase against Pakistan. The English were once again wobbling in a World Cup Final. What’s new?

However, if you have Stokes in the middle in a situation like this, I don’t think there’s any reason to worry. He’s a master in a situation like this.

Fifty-two off forty-nine.

It’s definitely not a T20-like innings. Not even close. It leans towards a responsibility innings. He hit the winning runs and is filled with absolute joy and happiness. Liam Livingstone runs towards him and hugs him from behind. He’s done it. He’s pulled his country from a deep hole, again.

Six years. He closed the never-ending loop. How many people get the opportunity to do that?

2022–2024: Bazball, or, the man who saved a format

This is the one I think history will care about the most, and it’s the one that gets argued about the most stupidly.

The reason that I have labelled the Bazball timeline from 2022 to 2024 instead of 2022 to 2026 is because of one simple reason.

Bazball died in 2024. I just feel that we were blinded by the fact that Stokes was still leading his formidable English side.

Bazball was a revolution, no doubt. It changed the way we perceived the game and how players and coaches of other nations needed to strategize well enough to counterattack this new change to English cricket.

England won against New Zealand, South Africa, Pakistan, New Zealand again, and tied with Australia. It looked like England were going to run riot against every side.

But after a crushing series defeat against India 4–1 in 2024, Bazball had officially been buried. It was figured out. The atomic bomb to Bazball had been created after two years.

Leaving that aside, he had instilled a new sense of bravery into this team. He made sure that the full dressing room knew that a draw was worth less than a defeat.

The critics love pointed out where the results tailed off. That he retires without an Ashes. That the last year of his captaincy was the toughest, with a thumping defeat against Australia. Fine. All true. Put it in the record.

But people seem to miss the enormous, obvious thing: Test cricket is alive, and it’s alive partly because of him. He made the longest format of the sport, the most exciting one.

There are teenagers right now who are obsessed with Test cricket because a red-headed man from Christchurch via Cockermouth decided the sport should be fun and refused to negotiate on that.

You can lose the Ashes and still win the argument. He won the argument.

2024: Twenty-four balls at Edgbaston

England needed 82. Zak Crawley’s finger was broken. Stokes opened.

The captain really didn’t have to open. He could have remained at his usual №6. The game was already won. The sensible thing would be to hand it over to someone else. Brook? Root?

Nope. He wanted to finish it off.

Stokes came out with all guns blazing as he reached his half-century in twenty-four deliveries. You didn’t hear that wrong. Twenty-four deliveries. He made an absolute mockery of the West Indian bowling attack. He also managed to achieve a new record in English cricket as he made the fastest half-century any Englishman had made in 147 years of Test cricket, beating a record Ian Botham had held for forty-three years.

Trent Bridge, 2026

The only thing that I can take away positively from his retirement is that he was able to bid farewell during a match. Not quietly on social media. He got the sendoff that he deserved. And what better team to give you a sendoff than the classy and cool Kiwis.

He announced it to his teammates and the cricketing world in the dressing room on the morning of day four. Told them the reasons could wait until the end of the match, told them to go out and give absolutely everything for two more days, and got a standing ovation from his teammates before he took the ball in his hands.

And on the very first delivery post-breaking the news, he took his 252nd wicket, because the universe and the stars have seemingly aligned perfectly for him.

He also decided to open the batting in his final innings in a Test that seemed impossible to win. He got a guard of honor from the New Zealanders, and charged the first ball he faced.

Thirty off twenty. Two sixes, two fours. Out slog-sweeping.

This story doesn’t have the perfect ending, as England lost the match by 150 runs. The series went to New Zealand 2–1. Bazball had officially been buried after four years.

But one thing that we can take away from the fourth innings was Stokes’s fight and grit. He always played for those two things. The scoreboard was a thing that happened afterwards.

What he actually gave me

Most sports teach you about excellence. Stokes taught me something even more important: refusal. There’s a contrast between the two. Excellence is about being better than other people. Refusal is the action that you have to take when being better isn’t going to cut it. When the maths disagrees. When the situation says no. When every reasonable person in the room looks at you in total disbelief.

He was never the most talented cricketing player of his generation. He’d definitely confirm that. He was banned from the game once. He got dropped by the English Cricket Board in the second test for a nightclub incident. He was injured constantly. He lost more than he won, in the end, as a captain. His average is 34.

Yet, he is undoubtedly the most important English cricketer of the 21st century.

You don’t have to be the best. You don’t have to be the one who’s still standing when it matters, still swinging, still convinced that the thing is possible when it demonstrably isn’t.

The odds don’t get a vote. That’s the whole lesson. That’s Headingley in a sentence.

Thank you for Cape Town. Thank you for Headingley. Thank you for Lord’s. Thank you for Melbourne and Edgbaston and all the crazy, against-the-odds declarations.

And, of course, thank you for Kolkata and rebounding from that.

The game will definitely lose a little bit of its magical energy and excitement. It’ll be quieter. Cricket will survive this period. But it definitely won’t be the same at 5:30 p.m. with the sun setting on the fifth day.

Legends retire. Legacies don’t. Yours will be the first one to be remembered by every kid who feels lost and disappointed and thinks, yeah, but.

Farewell, mate.

Thanks for reading my story!