Different ‘Stokes’ for Different Folks!

Ben Stokes Heroics in the Third Ashes Test Made All the Difference

This is the story of a third Ashes Test in one English summer, where England came in with their backs against the wall.

They were down in the series, after having lost the first Test and having just drawn the second at Lord’s. And then miraculously, against all the odds, they recovered — oh and how they recovered — to pip Australia in the third Test at Headingley thanks to the heroics of a phenomenal England allrounder who chipped in with both bat and ball. But enough about Ian Botham’s Ashes heroics of 1981.

This is actually the summer of a man born in the Antipodes, who first sent his birth country of New Zealand and then arch-rivals Australia ‘down under’ in two very different matches, different formats, but in a similar high stakes (or high Stokes, if you don’t mind) encounter.

( READ: Ben Stokes etches name into Ashes folklore with astonishing century)

Forgive me for puns, for simple words and lucid sentences do not quite suffice in trying to capture the essence of Ben Stokes. The magic of words doesn’t light up the way Stokes’ pyrotechnics do; but as the song goes, words are all I have.

In chaos theory, the butterfly effect has been described as ‘the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state’. But enough of science, this is…