Ben Stokes was born to walk onto a stage, not to be told to sit in the wings.
Yet here we are. The most compelling cricketer England has produced since Botham was doing burnouts in his Lamborghini, forced to miss a Test match because he swore at a journalist in New Zealand. In March. Eight months ago.
Let that sink in. A man who dragged England from the abyss of a 2-0 deficit in the 2019 Ashes, who reinvented Test cricket's soul as a captain, who once hit a century with his non-dominant hand while clutching a broken finger — sidelined for something that, in any other walk of life, would be a Tuesday.
The infraction: a crude word directed at a reporter who, by all accounts, had been needling him. The punishment: a one-match ban. The timing: an England tour of New Zealand, the very place where the alleged misdemeanour occurred. The result: Stokes watches from the dressing room while his side takes the field without him.
English cricket's disciplinary code is a labyrinth of misplaced priorities. Players get fined for the smallest breaches of a "spirit of cricket" that nobody can quite define, while systemic issues — county funding, scheduling madness, the slow death of red-ball cricket outside the Test arena — get a collective shrug.
Stokes's crime was crass but victimless. It wasn't ball-tampering. It wasn't fixing. It wasn't racial abuse. It was a bloke in a high-pressure job losing his temper for a split second. The sort of thing that happens in every pub, every office, every traffic jam in Britain, every single day.
Yet the Cricket Regulator — a body that sounds like it should be policing parking spaces at Lord's — decided this warranted a ban. The message: we'd rather lose our best player for a match than risk looking soft on a triviality.
The stage was built for him
Stokes's absence matters because cricket, in its current form, needs him. Test cricket is fighting for relevance against the pyjama leagues. England's Test team, under Stokes and Brendon McCullum, have dragged it back into the spotlight with a brand of cricket that is reckless, beautiful, and occasionally insane.
They take risks. They chase 350 on day five. They declare before lunch. They treat the draw like a disease. And Stokes is the totem of it all — the captain who leads from the front, who takes the new ball when others would hide, who walks out to bat with the score 30 for 4 and makes you believe.
Taking him off the field for a non-event is like cancelling the headline act at Glastonbury because he swore at a sound engineer. Technically, you can. But why would you want to?
The irony is deafening
Emma John, writing in the Guardian, put it better than most: the sport's "misguided morals" have humbled a man who should be celebrated. And she's right. Cricket loves a martyr — but only when they're dead, retired, or safely in the past. In the present, it prefers to clip wings.
There's a historical echo here. Botham was fined for swearing in a TV interview. Flintoff was reprimanded for a late-night pedalo incident. English cricket has always had an uneasy relationship with its larger-than-life characters — desperate for their brilliance, uncomfortable with their edges.
Stokes is not a saint. He knows it. We know it. But the attempt to sanitise him, to pretend he should be a role model in the way the ECB defines it, misses the point. He's not a role model because he's polite. He's a role model because he does things on a cricket field that seem impossible, and then does them again.
Banning him for a bad word is performative nonsense. It pleases nobody except the small number of people who think professional athletes should behave like librarians. And it robs fans of a chance to watch one of the few genuine geniuses the sport possesses.
Ben Stokes should be on a stage, not in a naughty corner.