Fit, trim Ben Stokes soon finds his rhythm in surprise new-ball role

There was only one place to be on Friday, as the well populated press box suggested. At Worcester, with Durham the visiting team, there were numerous storylines: Ben Stokes’s long-awaited return to competitive action; the fortunes of Ben McKinney and Emilio Gay, eyeing an opening slot for the first Test, and Marcus North’s impending move from his position as Durham’s director of cricket to be England’s national selector.

The latter is the least important, as these days a selector is only one cog in a well oiled scouting machine designed to operate efficiently regardless of who is in situ, unlike, say, in the days of Ted Dexter or Ray Illingworth, whose thoughts, in a cricketing context, were as important as Papal decree. Nevertheless, North will have a very clear idea of the relative merits of McKinney and Gay at least, who he has seen close at hand in domestic cricket.

Instead, after Alex Lees had elected to defer judgment on McKinney and Gay — relevant given James Rew’s low score for Somerset on Friday, at his first attempt up the order this season — it was Stokes who took centre stage as a bowler. In his first match since the New Year Test in Sydney, owing to an accident in the Durham nets when his cheekbone was fractured, Stokes looked very fit and trim during the play the weather afforded.

Durham’s attack is normally helmed by Ben Raine, who is having a fine early season, and Matthew Potts, rested here, but who has enjoyed a return to some kind of form after the Ashes, where he was a spectator in the main, before a final, horrible outing in Sydney.

In Potts’s absence, Stokes took the new ball from the Diglis End, bowling eight overs in two spells before lunch and returning for six more overs after a lengthy rain delay, looking in good rhythm as he did so.

Stokes took only eight balls to get his seasonal account under way, finding extra bounce to take the edge of Dan Lategan’s bat. Lategan, a South African youngster in the process of qualifying as a home rather than overseas player, is one of Worcestershire’s more promising players. Stokes then rattled Adam Hose’s stumps with his first ball after the second lengthy delay for rain.

The new ball, unsurprisingly, has been one of those problem areas for England since the retirement of James Anderson and Stuart Broad, and this summer will be the first for a generation without those two or Chris Woakes. Candidates for the new ball, such as Brydon Carse, Gus Atkinson and Josh Tongue, do not always take it for their counties, and Jofra Archer may not have his loads up in time after the Indian Premier League, reasons why Ollie Robinson is in the conversation now.

That in itself is a measure of the problem: Robinson is 32 years old with a suspect injury record and has not exactly been pulling up trees lately. It was a good day, then, for Sam Cook to have taken a brace of new-ball wickets for Essex and, at the time of writing, he is the leading wicket-taker in Division One. Raine is leading the way in Division Two, where Durham began the game in pole position.

Whenever a problem area arises, someone invariably raises the prospect of Stokes filling the hole. In the recent past, he has been touted as a No3 (before Jacob Bethell’s hundred in Sydney) and opening bowler, although he has always, rightly in my view, balked at these suggestions. He has a lot on his plate, as the side’s all-rounder and captain, and is right to be wary of extending his brief, at a critical juncture for his leadership.

The symmetry of Stokes’s return at Worcester, as he approaches the next and final stage of his captaincy and career, is impossible to ignore. It was here, in the same first week of May, against the same opposition — with New Zealand the visiting team for the opening Test of the summer in the first week of June, as they are this year — that he made his domestic bow as England captain four years ago.

He played an extraordinary statement innings on the second morning of that game, hitting a brutal hundred, replete with 17 sixes, the most in a championship innings. The question is whether he can find the same clarity and conviction now as then, when his innings demonstrated how he intended to go about leading the England team: which is to say, in a positive, freewheeling, buckle-up-for-the-ride kind of way.

It worked spectacularly for a while, with a two-year winning stretch and one of the most stunning transformations in sport. It didn’t last, culminating in a shocking Ashes tour last winter, when Stokes struggled as a batsman and captain. His team became deeply unpopular with a public who sensed a group that had got high on its own juices and lost sight of the fundamentals.

Where does Stokes go from here? It is hard to think he can have as much impact now as he had when transforming a group of players in dire need of direction and freedom after the Covid years. But after a winter when he and the coach, Brendon McCullum, began to diverge in their public messaging, clarity of direction and purpose is essential. If history repeats itself, the second day at Worcester may be the place to be, then, to watch Stokes the batsman in his latest incarnation.

On the first day, there was amusement to be had listening to the PA announcer, a noted wag on the county scene. “Tea and cake available to celebrate David Attenborough’s 100th birthday,” he announced at one point, “at the same prices as… two weeks ago.” The view of the cathedral from the pavilion at Worcester hasn’t changed much since 1926 — nor have the challenges that confront an England captain.

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