The signs were there at Scarborough before Ben Stokes’s defining Headingley heroics
IT’S funny but the abiding memory of Ben Stokes hereabouts is not of his performance at Headingley in 2019 but of his efforts at another Yorkshire ground entirely.
In August 2013, Yorkshire played Durham in a County Championship match at Scarborough’s North Marine Road.
Readers will no doubt remember the fixture, if perhaps not the detail, the match effectively a title decider between a home team then 25.5 points clear at the top of the table and second-placed opponents with a game in hand.
Stokes, then aged 22, and just over three months short of making his Test debut, produced a sensational all-round display that marked him out as a very special talent.
He scored 127 in Durham’s first innings total of 573, his second fifty arriving from just 41 balls, and followed it with his side’s best figures of 2-32 from 14 overs in the Yorkshire first innings, his dismissal of Kane Williamson sparking a collapse from 211-3 to 274 all-out as the home team - 299 runs behind - were forced to follow-on.
In an epic battle watched by an aggregate crowd of 18,500 (contrast that with the 7,500 aggregate that saw last month’s match against Warwickshire at Scarborough), Yorkshire fought back remarkably well, reaching 283-1 in their second innings, a deficit of 16.
At that point the match was in the “Gary Ballance”, you might say, but after getting rid of Williamson and Phil Jaques, the second-wicket pair who clawed Yorkshire back into it with a stand of 264, Stokes got rid of Ballance as well on his way to 3-108 from 33 overs, the hosts bowled out for 419 to leave Durham 121 to win in the game’s final session.
After a jaunty half-century from Scott Borthwick, it was Stokes who applied the coup de grace, clubbing the winning boundary off Williamson in a cameo that saw Durham seal a seven-wicket triumph.
“Had Yorkshire won, their Championship lead would have been practically unassailable,” said Wisden. As it was, Durham pulled clear to claim their third Championship in six seasons, Yorkshire forced to settle for runners-up place in their 150th anniversary year.
In the mind’s eye one can still see Stokes steaming in from the Trafalgar Square end in the Yorkshire second innings, the match and the Championship on the line, the balance of power slipping slowly from Durham with every run accumulated by the masterful Williamson and Jaques.
Summoning every ounce of skill and will, Stokes dismissed both men inside the first six overs of the final morning, Williamson caught in the gully by Will Smith for 97 before a magnificent delivery kissed the outside edge of Jaques’s bat on its way through to wicketkeeper Phil Mustard, the Australian out for 152.
It was to ruin Yorkshire’s hopes of setting Durham a nuisance target and piling pressure on a line-up left to combat Ryan Sidebottom, Jack Brooks, Steve Patterson, Liam Plunkett and Adil Rashid who, despite the collective first innings struggles, were an international attack in everything but name.
Stokes’s intervention was even more important given that Durham were without an international bowler themselves in the injured Graham Onions and, during the Yorkshire second innings, a future Test quick in Mark Wood, who succumbed to a side strain earlier in the piece.
Thus it was left to Stokes to shoulder the bulk of the work along with Jamie Harrison, Chris Rushworth and Scott Borthwick, the young all-rounder stepping up in Durham’s hour of need.
As Wisden wrote. “Stokes looked outstanding, following his 127 with aggressive bowling that brought wickets when it really mattered, and never more so than early on the final morning, when he removed Williamson and Jaques in three deliveries.”
Stokes, of course, was much younger back then. There were less miles on the clock and fewer tattoos, too; he was not yet the physical specimen he later became.
Yet, for over after over, he charged down the slope at North Marine Road with boundless athleticism, Yorkshire's batting steadily ebbing away, the balance of power rescued, never to be relinquished.
It was exhausting watching him as he imposed himself decisively on the contest as he was to do so many times during the course of a Test career that he brought to an end in Nottingham last week.
Not least when bowling a marathon second innings spell that kept England in the 2019 Headingley Test - and the target just within manageable range - long before his unbeaten hundred won the day and cemented his place in the pantheon, Stokes contributing 74 to a last-wicket stand of 76 with Jack Leach that reeled in a target of 359.
Who can forget the coup de grace on that occasion, Australia’s Pat Cummins cut savagely to the boundary as a raucous West Stand rose as one.
Stokes stood with his arms outstretched at the moment of triumph, letting out a primeval roar that reverberated across the Broad Acres and beyond.
It was the defining image of a great career, the possibilities of which were signposted in Scarborough before our very eyes.