The trouble with captaining by magic is that sooner or later there’s going to be a moment when you reach into your hat and instead of pulling out a rabbit you come up with a fistful of silk lining. We’ve become so used to seeing Ben Stokes conjure up something extraordinary when a Test match is on the line, whether it’s a blizzard of sixes, a tumble of wickets, a spectacularly acrobatic catch, an intuitive decision to put an unorthodox fielder in just the right position, it was a surprise to watch him scrabbling around trying to make a breakthroughas India batted on, and on, and on, through Monday afternoon.
England looked well in this game when Rishabh Pant walked to the crease, and looked well out of it when he left again, four hours and 118 runs later, on the far side of a 195-run partnership with KL Rahul.
Stokes tried. He set an odd field after lunch, when Pant was on 31, and India were crawling along at three runs an over. It didn’t have a slip, which, as Stokes goes, felt so very defensive that everyone assumed it must be a cunning ruse. They were disabused when Pant immediately edged the ball and Stokes moved Joe Root back there after all, too late to do anything about it. Soon after, Stokes launched himself into a headlong dive to try to catch a drive Pant walloped through extra cover, but it was travelling so fast that the ball ricocheted off his fingertips.
With everything else failing him, Stokes turned to the one tactic he’s always been able to count on and brought himself on to bowl from the Kirkstall Lane end. Rahul spanked his first ball to the boundary.
Stokes is one of the game’s great illusionists. His belief in this team makes them better than they really are. Shoaib Bashir can barely get a wicket in county cricket, but he’s taken 54 in 13 games for England under Stokes’s captaincy. Trouble is that on days like these, when Stokes is struggling to impose himself on the game, Bashir looks more like the guy who can’t even get into Somerset’s first team. By the time Pant was done with him you half-wondered if he’d actually turn out to be a tower of three little kids standing on each other’s shoulders disguised in a set of whites.
Pant toyed with his bowling, and just when you were pondering if he was restraining himself to leisurely singles so that England would keep Bashir in the attack, he decided to emasculate him by smacking him back over his head for a couple of sixes. Bashir got him in the end, caught at long-on. He’s taken three wickets this week, all of them caught in the deep. And while they all count in the score book, so do the 190 runs he went for, at nearly four an over.
But Stokes will stick with him, all through this summer and beyond it. He sees the best in all his players, which must make him a wonderful man to play for. In his eyes, Chris Woakes is a wizard who can work wonders with the new ball, as opposed to a grey-bearded medium-pacer whose body is held in shape by kinesiology tape. Woakes took his first wicket in his 40th over of the match, when he lured Karun Nair into slapping a drive right back at him for a return catch. You’d like to think the lack of pace on it was deliberate.
You may look at Zak Crawley and see a man with a habit of playing bad shots and one first-class hundred in the last 12 months, but in Stokes’s eyes he’s one of the world’s great opening stroke-makers. You may say that Ollie Pope has got the temperament of a startled deer at No 3, but in Stokes’s eyes he’s a rock of the middle order. And you may think that Jamie Smith is the kind of slap-happy batter who gets out trying to hit another six over the head of long leg, but Stokes knows he’s doing exactly what they want him to do.
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Well, Stokes has made his name, and won some of England’s greatest victories, by refusing to believe in what everyone else sees in front of them. Seventy-three runs needed to beat Australia and only Jack Leach left to bat with? Game on. Every one of his most famous wins seems to be a test of faith.
And somehow, at the end of the fourth day’s play in which India’s batters have scored their fourth and fifth centuries of the match, England are still in this one, too. Because while everyone else in this game may say that scoring 350 on a fifth‑day pitch, against an attack with Jasprit Bumrah in it, is as good as impossible, Stokes will tell you otherwise.