Ben Stokes must drop Superman tag and be saved from himself

It was the most senseless and wasteful injury since Stokes last pulled his hamstring, which ruled him completely out of the home Test series against Sri Lanka and partially out of the one in Pakistan. The Ashes mean nothing to the England and Wales Cricket Board compared with flogging off the Hundred. So Stokes had to pull on a shirt for Northern Superchargers last August instead of resting between the West Indies and Sri Lanka home series.

He managed to escape from one game on a greasy Cardiff outfield without rupturing himself while bowling, but disaster struck when he was opening the batting shortly afterwards – all to sell the Hundred, the runt of men’s formats, to the highest bidders.

The ECB should have known better than to let Stokes play in the Hundred. And the England management should have known better than to let Stokes bowl himself into the ground at Hamilton. After all Stokes would never have dreamed of flogging Brydon Carse or Gus Atkinson to anything like the same extent that he flogged himself.

McCullum must stand up to Stokes

There comes a point when Brendon McCullum has to exercise his influence and tell his captain to ease off; Ollie Pope, the vice-captain, cannot be expected, while keeping wicket, to run up to a vastly senior player and say: “Take a break, Ben.” Joe Root is in an invidious position as the ex-captain, not wanting to challenge the current captain’s authority, or being seen to do so.

Much is to be said for this McCullum reign but the mistakes cannot be airbrushed out of Bazball history. Sticking Dan Lawrence up to open in the Test series against Sri Lanka, in place of Zak Crawley, led to the loss of the Oval Test and was, at best, “mindless optimism” – at worst a way of getting a player to rule himself out of Test contention forever.

And the fact that Crawley could not play in that series against Sri Lanka, having broken a finger, was the result of selecting Mark Wood for back-to-back Tests – the second of which was a dead-rubber match like the one in Hamilton, England leading 2-0 against West Indies. A bowler of lesser pace than Wood – and every one is lesser in pace – would have been less likely to do such damage; the thick edge to second slip would not have been such a screamer.

Wood is still in rehab, having played only one more game after those back-to-back Tests; Crawley can no longer field in the slips and has reached 30 in only one Test innings since that serious fracture, 78 on the all-time flattie that was the first Test pitch in Multan.