The messiest corner of any sports writer’s life is their waste-paper bin. A lot of the time print deadlines are so tight that most of the writing is done live while the match happens, and since sport has an unfortunate way of throwing up all those late twists you end up, often as not, throwing half of it away.
This is the stuff that does not even get to be the next day’s fish and chip paper, intros undone by late winners, articles discarded because of last-wicket partnerships, rough first drafts of the history that almost was. This summer, there have been an awful lot of screwed-up pages wasted on what England did before Ben Stokes had finished.
There were the “where did it all go wrong?” pieces we started out on at Lord’s when England were midway through the back half of the World Cup final, 86 for four after 24 overs and 155 runs away from where they needed to be.
And the “what now?” articles we began half an hour after lunch at Headingley on Sunday, when England had only three wickets left to save the Ashes. All the post-mortems we had to abandon when the corpse magically sprang back to life and started walloping sixes all over. If Stokes had made just one wrong decision, played just one rash shot, in either of those two innings, then the future of English cricket would be very different.
There is more, from back before all that. In the scrap folder of my laptop I have a copy of Stokes’s career obituary, written in the winter of 2017 when he had been banned from playing for England and was awaiting trial on a charge of affray after a fight outside a nightclub in Bristol.
Like a lot of writers, I had one ready in case he was found guilty. Mine started with an anecdote from his autobiography, Firestarter. It was from December 2015, right after England’s short tour of Sri Lanka. He had barely made a run all winter and was so dejected that when he got home to his family he turned around and went right back out again to go and play drinking games with three of his teammates. It’s what happened next that made the story seem worth repeating. He “red-carded himself”, went home at half one in the morning, got into the shower and then broke down in tears.
“All my emotions came pouring out,” he says. “I was completely gone.” He does not dwell on it long. On the very next page he asks his agent to find him some winter cricket and before you know it he is back hitting sixes and taking wickets. He skips over it so quickly it feels like he has no idea what a bleak read it all is. It never seems to occur to him that, the way he tells it, he sounds a lot like a man who was drinking to self-medicate a depression.
Stokes always did move on quickly. He was running in and out of trouble all his young life. In 2013 he was sent home from the England Lions tour to Australia after he stayed out drinking till 5.30 in the morning on his first day there and then he and Matt Coles got caught out and about after midnight two days before a game later in the trip. “You don’t want to play for England, you just want to piss it away with your mates,” the coach, Andy Flower, told him. “Get your shit together.”
Stokes resolved to do exactly that. Right after he and Coles had stopped off for another couple of beers with a friend at the airport. “The impression I needed to make was in the longer term,” Stokes kidded himself, and no one else, when he was explaining that particular decision.
Well, in the longer term, he ended up being caught breaking his curfew so he could go out drinking on tour again. “We’ve been here before,” the management told him. And he injured himself punching a locker in the West Indies, so he had to miss the World Twenty20. It was reported then that he was going to be made to attend anger-management classes. “Nonsense,” said Stokes, because as one of the chapter headings puts it in the book, “who needs anger management?”
The point is that each of these incidents has its own alternative history, too. Every one could have been the beginning of something new. They were the turning points he passed along the way to that court date in August 2018. “That was a year ago, a long time ago,” Stokes said it when came up in his press conference at Headingley on Sunday. And that was all he wanted to say about it.
Only he, his friends, family and teammates know how it has all affected him. But from where we are sitting it seems pretty clear there is one big change. These last few months, he has grown into the best version of himself. He has fulfilled his potential in a way few people in any walk of life ever do, has wrung every last drop out of his talent, with nothing squandered.
Whatever else happens in the remaining two Ashes Tests, Stokes will always own this summer, just like Ian Botham owned 1981 and Andrew Flintoff did 2005. In the public mind we will always see him with his bat in hand, arms spread wide either side in celebration, and that grim security camera footage of him we all watched a year ago will come to seem even more blurred, grainy and distant.