Leadership Without Fear

Part 3 was the case for the prosecution: the away hammerings, the short-ball trap, the one-gear stubbornness. And yet, through all of it, the dressing room never stopped believing in Ben Stokes. That is the thing that needs explaining. It was not the tactics that held them. It was the man, and the plain fact that the freedom he asked of his players, he had already paid for himself.

What he had survived#

By the time Stokes became captain in 2022, he had been through a decade most people could not imagine. In September 2017 he was involved in a late-night brawl outside a Bristol nightclub. It led to a six-day trial for affray the following year; one man was left with a fractured eye socket, and a guilty verdict would have meant prison and the end of Stokes's career. He was acquitted, but came out of it hollowed and angry. At a motorway services near Harrogate he told his agent he never wanted to play for England again. He was talked round only slowly, on the simple argument that he played not for the men in suits but for himself, his family and his team-mates.

Then 2019 gave him the summer of his life, the World Cup final and Headingley, and with it a level of fame that dragged him onto the front pages, not just the back. Days after that Ashes ended, a tabloid splashed a story about the murder of two of his half-siblings in New Zealand, years before he was born. He called it despicable, and could not get through reading his mother's statement about it. Early in 2020 his father, Ged, was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, 12,000 miles away in Christchurch, and died that December. Stokes still marks every century by bending a middle knuckle, the way his dad's hand looked after he had a finger joint taken off rather than miss a season of rugby. For years Ged told the boys a crocodile had got it.

By the middle of 2021, his father's death still unprocessed and a broken finger refusing to heal, Stokes walked away from cricket altogether to look after his mental health. He went quiet, and stopped returning calls even from close team-mates. Stuart Broad, who spent time with him then, said it made him grow up fast, in a brutal way. When he came back, the people around him said he was a different person.

The tattoo#

What he brought back was a hard-won version of a line athletes recite without always believing it: that once cricket stops being the whole of your life, the fear of failing at it loosens its grip, and you play better for it. He did not pick this up off a motivational poster. He already had it, inked on his arm long before anyone said the word Bazball: words to the effect that you can only be your best once the fear of failure is gone. The philosophy that would later get a silly name was, in a real sense, tattooed on the captain's arm.

Loose hands#

So his first instruction as captain was not a tactic. It was almost a feeling: bat like you're not gripping the handle too tight. McCullum's first team talk was just as short. No idiots, don't end up on the front page, and let's actually entertain people, because Test cricket is on the edge and if we entertain, the results will follow. Neither man spoke for long. That was the point.

From there came the rule of shutting out what they called the outside noise. This isn't the media's team, Stokes said before his first match. Pundits and writers had a job to do, but their opinion was not the players' problem; the only verdicts that counted came from inside the dressing room. For a group that had spent years flinching at criticism, that permission was most of the battle.

Backing the man in the corner#

Rob Key noticed early what made the pair unusual. Most coaches, he said, are all over you when you are flying and nowhere to be found when you are drowning. Stokes and McCullum were the other way round: their attention went to the player who thought the world was ending. The proof of it is a small story. After Stokes hit an 18-year-old county spinner, Josh Baker, for thirty in an over, the boy was abused online that night. A message came from a number he did not recognise: Stokes, telling him not to let one day define his season, and signing off as the bloke who once got hit for the last over of a World Cup final. It was unprompted, and it was not a form letter.

He spent that empathy on his own players too. He made a point of backing the man in a slump, not only the man in form. He set out to make Jack Leach, ground down under the previous regime, feel ten feet tall; it was Leach who coined the line Stokes loved to repeat: we may not be the best, but we'll be the bravest. The numbers that came out of that dressing room were startling. Batter after batter scored faster, and often better, than they ever had.

Adults treated like adults#

The freedom ran through everything, not just the batting. McCullum trimmed the backroom staff, scrapped the long team meetings and the on-field huddles, stopped inviting county coaches to nets, and made golf almost as much a part of a Test week as practice. Players could turn up half an hour before play if that suited them, and the midnight curfew was binned. Adults, the thinking went, should be treated like adults.

It had a downside, and Part 3 has already named it. In the first two Tests of the 2023 Ashes England were slack, shedding dropped catches and a rash of no-balls, forty-one of them, against ten in the last three Tests once they tightened up. The same loose feeling that freed the batting could, on a bad day, leak into carelessness. Stokes took that trade, and mostly it paid.

The cost#

There was a bill, and Stokes paid it himself. The whole philosophy asked the captain to lead from the very front, which for an all-rounder meant bowling the long, thankless spells as well as batting in the middle order. But he had chronic tendonitis in his left knee, and the more he asked of it the less it gave back. By the 2023 Ashes a twelve-over spell of bouncers at Lord's seemed to finish him as a bowler for the series; from then on he was, more and more, a batsman who happened to be captain.

An all-rounder captain who insists on doing everything wears out faster than anyone on the field, and that is what happened. When he finally retired, mid-match at Trent Bridge in 2026, he did not point to an injury. He talked about being worn through. "I maybe potentially had burnt myself out," he said. It was four years of asking his body, and his mind, for more than they had, and at 35 being told no.

He changed English cricket and paid for it personally. Which leaves the last question, the one opponents asked from the very first month: could anyone else actually do this, or did it need this exact man, this coach, and a country willing to lose in a particular way?