Last Updated on 18 seconds ago by Charbel Coorey
Sir Andrew Strauss believes the method for announcing Ben Stokes’s retirement served as a distraction to the team. At 3:25pm local time during the second session of the fourth day, news filtered through Trent Bridge that the third Test against New Zealand would be Stokes’s last international match.
From there, England played a very emotional – and reckless – brand of cricket. After New Zealand declared on 288/9 following Daryl Mitchell’s outstanding century, Stokes came out to open in what was later termed a tactical move to counter the new ball in a chase of 373 on a wearing pitch. However, other England players – most notably Harry Brook – wanted to hit every ball for a boundary even with the field spread.
On the batting approach, coach Brendon McCullum said it was a collaborative decision. “For a start, it was a collaborative approach in terms of coming up with those tactics. There is no lone wolf making decisions,” he said on Sky Sports.
“We had to acknowledge we were a long way behind in the game. It was going to be really difficult to score at a decent cruising speed today [day five] with the pitch doing what it was doing and the ball going soft. So we wanted to eat into that deficit [on day four] as much as we possibly could.”
Sir Andrew Strauss believes the Ben Stokes retirement announcement wasn’t orchestrated the right way
However, Sir Andrew Strauss says England did not give themselves a proper shot at winning the crucial, series-deciding Test. In a LinkedIn post, Strauss mentioned England’s batting almost felt like the end of the Bazball era.
“It doesn’t feel like a time for negatives and so I hesitate to say this but I’m not convinced that the whole thing was orchestrated the right way yesterday – it seems like a huge distraction to a team that was battling to avoid a series defeat and the the cricket in the last session very much had an ‘end of term’ feel to it,” Strauss wrote.
“Everyone has the right to bow out on their own terms, and no one has earned that more than Ben, but announcing before or after the game seems like a more sensible approach. When you are in the middle of a match, the only thing that matters is the performance of the team.”
At the same time, Strauss was full of praise for Stokes the cricketer and what he achieved for England. There are a few innings that sticks closely in Strauss’s mind, including the Headingley classic in 2019.
“He will rightly go down as one of England’s genuine greats, and I would go as far as saying he played the two greatest Test innings I have ever seen at Headingley in 2019 and at Lords in 2023 [against Australia],” Strauss wrote. “His innings in the 2019 World cup final would also be up there with the very best in that format too. This is a guy who revelled in the big moments. A genuine superstar.”
McCullum defended the decision to announce the news the way they did as Stokes is deserving of the recognition.
“I was quite strong on my opinions that we should get it out there when we could, because I think he’s been a cricketer that’s been able to transcend the sport into other aspects of society. I felt the people that have supported Ben in the last 13 years he’s been involved… they deserve the opportunity to say goodbye,” McCullum said.
England went on to lose by 160 runs, leading to widespread criticism of the team and their approach.
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