Ben Stokes: A day of cricketing glory for England's Cape crusader

Once every 10 or 15 years, England somehow manages to produce a cricketer who rewrites the rule book

Ben Stokes hits England’s fastest double century in Test history (AFP/Getty)

It has been the dreariest start to a year we can remember: incessant rain, a dank, sullen wind, daffodils incongruously bursting into flower, and floods, floods and more floods, capped by the dawning realisation that there are months more of this rubbish yet to come.

And then there was Ben Stokes.

Once every 10 or 15 years, England somehow manages to produce a cricketer who shatters the national stereotypes of cheese-paring caution and prudence, rewrites the rule book and sends the scribes scouring their lexicons for superlatives. Now, after Ian Botham and Andrew Flintoff, national redemption has descended in the form of the 24-year-old redhead from Cockermouth.

Against South Africa in Cape Town, Stokes smashed a double century faster than any Englishman has done before, and faster than any other batsman in history but one (Nathan Astle, of New Zealand, against England in 2002). When he came in to bat, the bowler was on a hat-trick and the innings on a knife edge. Yet in no time at all, Stokes drove, stroked and thrashed his way to such a pitch of domination that South Africa’s bowlers were helpless. His first six went over the boundary rope; his second flew out of the Newlands ground, over a railway line and into the grounds of a nearby brewery.

Like Botham and Flintoff, Stokes is an all-rounder, batting left-handed but bowling right-handed, and it was therefore fitting that he rounded off his incredible day by taking a vital wicket, too (and Jonny Bairstow, his equally flame-haired partner at the crease, took his maiden Test century).

It was just one day, far away – a display of heroics in a funny old game at the end of the world by a young man who, though he made his debut for Cockermouth Cricket Club in Cumbria, was born in New Zealand and raised there until the age of 12. No matter; he has made the winter appreciably shorter and for several hours practically bearable.