Ben Stokes further polished his reputation as a modern legend after producing a thrilling show with the bat under nerve-shredding circumstances and even though his effort didn’t culminate in an England win, the century he scored at Lord’s against a fired up Australian pace attack was worth its weight in gold.
It was yet another sparkling effort from Stokes with the bat adding to the list of his memorable performances including the ODI World Cup final (2019), Edgbaston jailbreak (2019 Ashes Test) or T20 World Cup final (2022).
His monumental 155 revived England’s hopes in chase of 371 after they suffered a terrible batting collapse.
Australia prevailed but Stokes had reminded his opponents what he brings to the table.
Australia legend Ricky Ponting has paid Stokes, the current England Test captain, a massive compliment by comparing his performances in testing conditions to that of India legend MS Dhoni.
“I think any international player is under pressure anytime they walk out to play, but Ben batting in the middle order or later order like he does, probably finds himself in more match-winning opportunity situations than some others might”, Ponting said on ICC Review.
“The first one that comes to mind is maybe someone like a Dhoni, who’s there at the end in a lot of T20 games, and finishing games, whereas Ben’s doing it at the end of Test matches, and there’s not, probably not many, many players through the history of the game that have found themselves in that sort of role and are there at the end winning games, and especially as a captain,” he added.
In the Edgbaston Test of 2019, Stokes scored a memorable century to help England chase down 359 runs for a breathtaking one-wicket win.
And Ponting said Stokes nearly produced a repeat of that show in Lord’s last week.
“I thought and everyone probably thought he could do it again because we’ve seen it happen before, but this was probably, slightly more runs that they were chasing (in 2019)”, Ponting said.
“In the back of the back of everyone’s minds, I think once it started playing out the way that it was and how many similarities there were to Headingley in 2019…Steve Smith dropped him…and he was dropped on 116 by Marcus Harris at Headingley, So those sort of ghosts of the past kept coming back out,” he added.
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