LONDON (Web Desk) - What's in a moment? For Ben Stokes, his entire career inhabited the moment. But which moment would you care to remember?
The moment he carved Pat Cummins through the covers to seal England's run chase for the ages at Headingley? Or the moment his world was launched, like a solar-red distress flare, high into the night sky at Eden Gardens as Carlos Brathwaite obliterated England's dreams in Kolkata?
The moment that he opted to play the percentages against a Trent Boult full toss at Lord's in 2019, and pat England's route to a World Cup final Super Over, rather than push his luck any further in a final shot for glory? Or when he risked it all in a hot-headed, ill-fated moment of madness outside a Bristol nightclub in September 2017, and almost ended his career in the process?
You could plot your life against Stokes' moments in the course of his blood-and-thunder career. No player of his age lived more wilfully on the edge, nor proved more willing to teeter over it in pursuit of victory - as he did, time and again, not least in the course of his captivating captaincy stint. "You're hanging on by a very thin thread," as Cuba Gooding Jr's character, Rod Tidwell, puts it in Jerry Maguire. "And I dig that about you!"
And last week it all came crashing down, in another montage of moments against New Zealand at Trent Bridge. And while it's impossible to ignore the absurd solipsism of Stokes' final hours as an active England cricketer, you could glimpse - even as his castle crumbled around him - the same surety of purpose that had fuelled him in his pomp.
Imagine being Zak Foulkes, the man in Stokes' sights as he thundered in for the 11th and final over of a spell that - as the whole of Trent Bridge suddenly knew - had been stage-managed to coincide with the announcement of his retirement. In the split-second that it took for Stokes to find the edge from that hard length outside Foulkes' off stump, the focus had already shifted from New Zealand's collective pursuit of a match-winning position to the sort of one-on-one battle that Stokes had spent his career seeking, and (with some obvious and honourable exceptions) winning.
Poker players know that if you are confident you hold the best hand, the surest route to victory is to get your chips in early. A pair of aces will win more than 80% of the time in any heads-up scenario, and it's only if you allow other players to play their own cards that those odds can begin to diminish.
As soon as he had gone all in, the crowd was transformed from a mood of passive frustration to rapt anticipation. Stokes' speed and rhythm were transformed too - according to Sky Sports, he was 4mph quicker once the Trent Bridge tannoy had done his bidding. And if that helped to focus his mind, then it surely forced Foulkes' to wander fatefully away from the task at hand. It was as if Stokes wanted to answer the question that Graham Gooch had posed, in not dissimilar circumstances, to Ian Botham 40 years earlier: "Me. I write my own scripts."
We can squabble for all eternity about Stokes' final career stats. They clearly aren't as good as his best moments imply they ought to have been, but nor do they capture how incredible he proved to be in the clutch moment. He always knew that the hand he was dealt in this sport was a good one, but his mind was even stronger - to the extent that it could override his often fragile body. Therefore he backed his nerve to hold better than 80% of the opponents in his sights.
It was far from an infallible policy - in fact, you could argue it became self-defeating by the back end of his time as captain, when England started to go too hard too soon, without the cards to back up their conviction. But you could rarely say it was anything less than compelling viewing, and for approximately four years at the absolute zenith of his form and fitness, from 2016 to 2020, there was no cricketer in the world that you'd rather have in your corner.
The irony is that Stokes himself seemed cornered as he set about administering the last rites of his own career. In his final moments as an England cricketer, he had long since ceased to be the beating heart of a dressing room packed with his peers, and seemed instead to have decided that the effort it took to empathise with the newer, less-experienced players in his ranks outweighed his desire to bring them up to speed in the first place.
This hadn't always been the case for Stokes, particularly during his captaincy stint. In his early years in the role, he earned rave reviews for his handling of a succession of debutant spinners, from Rehan Ahmed to Tom Hartley and Shoaib Bashir. But there came a moment - around the time of last winter's Brisbane Test and his infamous "no place for weak men" speech - when the failure of his endeavours seemed to overwhelm him, and that urge to nurture simply vanished.
In his parting, therefore, Stokes reverted to being the awkward outsider of his own rookie years - the locker-punching hothead of 2014-15 vintage, whose talent was undeniable but of whom he felt the question was once again being asked (especially during those tense initial hours after the Rex Rooms saga, when the ECB was being notably standoffish): "Is he really worth it?"
The same has been asked of England superstars before, and the answer has invariably been polarising. Take Kevin Pietersen's excommunication in the wake of the 2013-14 Ashes. That was the ECB's last PR disaster of this magnitude, because just like Stokes now, KP had an incredible and underappreciated cut-through with the wider British sporting public - those casual fans who can't be dealing with cricket's day-to-day psychodramas but who love an Ashes contest, and adore its bar-emptying main protagonists.
Andrew Flintoff carried the same aura into his dying days as an England cricketer. By the 2009 Ashes, he too was struggling to gel with a dressing room that was in awe of his exploits without being entirely enamoured of the personality he had become. Though it was not quite his final Test, Flintoff's match-winning spell at Lord's bore all the traits Stokes sought to project at Trent Bridge - right down to his infamous Jesus-on-the-cross celebration, every bit as self-satisfied as Stokes' curious fourth-evening coda.
The ultimate issue for Stokes, however, is that the fun seemed to have vanished long before the New Zealand series went south. That in itself was not a new phenomenon, as shown by the burnout he suffered in the midst of Covid in 2020-21. But whereas his response to Ashes failure four years ago had been to come out swinging and have a ball with his mates, this time around there were no such coping mechanisms still available to him.
It was notable, in the midst of the New Zealand series, to watch Nasser Hussain in stitches in Sky Sports' film room, reliving the chaos of his maiden series as England captain - the infamous 2-1 loss to New Zealand in 1999 - with his old team-mates Phil Tufnell and Mike Atherton.
Hussain, in his playing days, was a notoriously intense personality. And yet, the easy rapport of those exchanges was a reminder of how cricket teams entwine the characters from which they are built, and that a decade of shared experiences - good and bad - tend to forge bonds that simply cannot be broken.
It's easy to imagine Stokes sitting on a similar sofa a few decades down the line, with Jonny Bairstow, James Anderson or Stuart Broad, and reminiscing with hilarity about the japes that their own careers encompassed. It's less easy to imagine him doing that with the team-mates that have come onto the scene more recently. That isn't to say they are not worthy, but as his farewell speech to the dressing room rather confirmed, he's done with the pleasantries required to make it happen.
Hussain felt similarly in the summer of 2003, when - having moaned all winter about England's upcoming "PlayStation generation" - he came to the swift conclusion that the team had moved on without him. Likewise, you only had to glance at Jacob Bethell's astonished face during Stokes' address at Trent Bridge to be reminded of the gulf that suddenly exists within the current Test squad. Seven years have already elapsed since Stokes' annus mirabilis in 2019. Bethell, back then, was still an autograph-hunting 15-year-old, let alone a genuine contender to take on a captaincy role.
And so it was, with a strange combination of disillusionment and main-character energy, that Stokes decided to upend his entire apple cart in the pursuit of one final moment. Like Botham's last hurrah at the 1992 World Cup final, it all ended rather ignominiously, and with lashings of hindsight to suggest that the venture had been doomed from the outset.
And yet, until Daryl Mitchell's shriek of triumph at mid-on had confirmed that the gambit had failed, Stokes had been living in the only way that he knew how. Entirely in the moment.