Ben Stokes’ ODI retirement should be a wake-up call to cricket’s leaders

It feels fitting in some ways that during a week that is hotter than Hades – when alarms bells about our direction of travel should be ringing even louder – that Ben Stokes has announced his retirement from one-day international cricket.

Yep, the champion all-rounder who powered England to World Cup victory by the barest of margins three summers ago, in front of a packed house at Lord’s and with the UK’s largest cricket audience since the heady 2005 Ashes, has decided the 50-over stuff must make way. If not, his schedule as an elite all-format player would become suffocating. The hope now is that this similarly prompts a wake-up call.

Rather poetically, he will bid farewell to the format after winning his 105th ODI cap at the Riverside in Chester-le-street, County Durham on Tuesday. It’s the ground that Ged and Deborah Stokes used to drive their restless, sports-mad son to from their home in Cockermouth some three times a week, two hours each way, in an act of selfless parenting that lit the fire for a remarkable sporting career.

Ben Stokes, England cricketer and totemic Test captain, powers on, of course. In fact more so, in terms of where, aged 31, he wants to direct his energies. Modern all-format stars don’t tend to jack it all in at once anyway, rather strip away that which means least to them and design their latter years weighing up health, wealth and happiness.

When they do so it says a bit about the player and plenty about the sport. And Stokes could not have been clearer about the bigger picture here, citing an “unsustainable schedule” and his fear of letting down teammates. For a cricketer paid by one of the boards responsible for this, to be so explicit in pushing back is quite the thing.

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