Ben Stokes: ‘It’s like you’re a glass bottle, holding everything in. Eventually, it smashes’

Ben Stokes sits in the bathroom of a Nottingham hotel, unable to breathe. It is 6am, the morning after a match in the Hundred last year, and he is having a panic attack. It is not the first. He phones his agent, Neil Fairbrother, whose wife, Audrey, tries to calm him down. But all three know greater help is required.

It’s fair to say this was not in the script; not for Stokes, the dirt-stained warrior who 18 months earlier had almost single-handedly delivered World Cup glory at Lord’s and then felled Australia at Headingley with one of the greatest Ashes innings. And not for the makers of a documentary about the 31-year-old’s life and career, which began filming shortly after he found himself in this intensely dark place.

In an arresting early scene in Ben Stokes: Phoenix from the Ashes, which is released this week on Prime Video, a gaunt Stokes, eyes red and sunken, is seen biting his bottom lip nervously. He is two weeks into what became a four-month break from the sport and telling Sam Mendes, the renowned director and the interviewer/narrator for this project, about the spate of anxiety attacks that made him consider retiring.

The attacks were striking indiscriminately, one time in a dry cleaners when he felt his heart was “sweating” and he had to escape and another while picking up his son from a children’s party. But the most significant came after that Hundred match at Trent Bridge. Stuart Broad, his teammate and close friend, bluntly puts it: “I could have seen him never playing again.”

Twelve months later, Stokes says he is barely able to recognise himself on screen. He is in a brighter place, leading the Test team with the aggression that has underpinned his career and in an interview with the Guardian before