When adrenaline dismantled logic: Ben Stokes' bloody-minded Headingley miracle

NICK FRIEND: Even among teammates, nobody truly knows the sheer depths to which their peers can dig. It must be some thrill to work alongside such skill, learning of its limitlessness only as it unfolds before your beleaguered eyes

When, eventually, you step away from it all, there is something quite frightening about the power of adrenaline.

It invokes a crazed fearlessness. It gives a nudge to the impossible, it places a howling tailwind behind the implausible, it drags the defeated from the brink. It pushes you to places you didn’t believe were conceivable. And it does so at the expense of all else and all others.

Its role as a hormone is to prepare its subject for fight or flight. It is a deeply personal part of oneself; it is what makes moments – and afternoons – like Sunday so truly astonishing. It takes the human as far as it can go.

At Headingley, just as at Lord’s on that famous July evening, Ben Stokes was strapped into his own zone. Somewhere deep inside, he knew where it could take him. For the rest of us, not a clue. It became the white-knuckle ride from hell.

Even for Jack Leach, each of his 17 deliveries will have depicted themselves as unbearable mini-episodes. The run-ups of Pat Cummins, of Josh Hazlewood, of James Pattinson, even the gentle trot of Nathan Lyon will have felt like eternities.

Like many a film franchise, as every sequel was chucked down at him, it all got worse. You wondered why and how we were being put through this, how it had come to this, whether it was even worth it for the inevitable heartache that so often follows the peak of hope. The minds of a cricketing nation were a single collective.

There were thoughts of Jofra Archer’s slog-sweep. Jos Buttler stranded mid-pitch – an emblem of England’s faltering Ashes series – replayed through memories; a member of England’s glorious one-day side down for the count, running on empty, aground in purgatory as Travis Head swooped from short midwicket to run him out.

At that moment, if you were looking to fall-guys, England’s World Cup wicketkeeper would have been among them. Short of runs, targeted by Australia, surely feeling the emotional strain of an absurd summer and a non-stop schedule.

With the Ashes gone, you’d give him a month off to prepare for further rigours – go and live a little, Jos. Enjoy a life without cricket – albeit for the next few weeks.

But not now. Not now that adrenaline has done its weird, deranged thing. Not now that Stokes has ripped off his helmet and unleashed an extraordinary gladiatorial roar. Earlier in the day, his helmet had been burst into pieces. Now he held it aloft, with Leach - his physical opposite - bounding towards him.

For a time earlier, that adrenaline was laying low. It was the lion waiting to pounce. Stokes was operating in survival mode – not so much for himself, but for the survival of others around him.

^{Ben Stokes struck an unbeaten 135 to keep England's Ashes hopes alive}

Stuart Broad reflected as much as he spoke to Sky Sports afterwards. He chatted to Ian Ward with all the surety of a man petrified of ghosts, but knowingly living among them. His voice quivered - that of a half-concentrated child, chatting away while fiddling his way through a tense game of Operation.

Quite simply, it seemed as though he could scarcely believe what he had witnessed. Even among teammates – those who know Stokes’ cricket best, nobody truly knows the sheer depths to which their peers can dig. It must be some thrill to work alongside such skill, learning of its limitlessness only as it unfolds before your beleaguered eyes.

“He stayed in first gear until [we were] nine down. He just kept going,” Broad said.

"To be able to put that Jos Buttler runout out of his mind is an incredible skill as well, to just focus on his job. To be able to flip from first gear to fifth gear in the way that he did and clear the ropes shows what a freakish cricketer he is.”

A freak. An absolute freak. In all the very best ways possible. There is a popular argument that what separates the very best from the rest is consistency; a belief that, in a particular scenario, anyone can be the best, that anyone can pull off the miraculous, but that the best do it more often.

Ellyse Perry, the world’s finest female cricketer – perhaps of all time, told me just as much last month.

“On any given day, one player could be the best player in the world and not be the best in the next game they play,” she patted back with a modesty both disarming and alarming.

But then, you watch what Stokes achieved here, what Perry accomplished last month or, indeed, what Steve Smith managed at Edgbaston, and you are disproven. The best are the best because they are the best. They do what others daren't attempt.

Just as England saw this Test as an opportunity opened up by Smith’s absence, you only have to take a scan down England’s curious hodgepodge of a batting lineup – a debate for another day, no question – to understand the sheer audacity of what Stokes pulled off.

Because, what he pulled off, only he could have pulled off. While the emotional wellbeing of England’s World Cup heroes has been readily questioned and raised amid an unprecedented summer that has both thrilled and drained the nation like none other, Stokes has risen.

That is not to criticise his colleagues; that they look shattered is certainly no personal slight - rather, Stokes’ knock is a further nod to the absurdity of his own mentality of mentalism.

^{Stokes and Jack Leach put on 76 runs for the final wicket, knowing that a single mistake could lose the Ashes}

Stokes, of course, missed England’s win over Ireland to see his family, to return to the relative normality of his northeast home and Cockermouth Cricket Club for a week back in the real world before restoring his superhero cape for the second half of the mother of all seasons.

The superhero narrative is the narrative of the day and of the year. And well it might be. Yet, there is something about Stokes' placement in that role – this adrenaline-fueled engine – that is so unfailingly fascinating.

The whole notion of superheroism – if such a term exists for the achievements of these fictional, cartoon icons – is based around invincibility. And, of course, they don’t truly exist. They are fictional. They are aspirational, make-believe role-models, but then they’re not really. You know you can’t reach them. That’s the whole point.

In popular culture, they are there for no reason other than to entertain and, in doing so, to highlight the implausibility upon which they are built. Spiderman, Superman, Batman – you would never believe them to be real. They exist as alter-egos of Peter Parker, Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne – they represent an immortal version of vulnerability.

And then you’ve got Ben Stokes: the superhero of 2019. He is both Parker and Spiderman; we all know of his mortality, of the other side of the coin. We have seen him fall short. We have seen him at his lowest. Just perhaps, it adds further height to his legend, further drama to what he accomplished here. There is bona fide, 24-carat heroism, and then there is tragic heroism.

And while Stokes was sprinting on an adrenaline that we could neither touch nor feel, he was destined for one of those two deeply contrasting endpoints: glory or a most glorious failure.

The whole time, he was in the zone. It was just him in an ice-cold room. No distractions. Not even the demise of Buttler, a departure for which he knew he was at least partially responsible. Not even Archer’s harum-scarum innings – a runout waiting to happen, only avoided when he top-edged to the boundary-rider. Not even the falling of two sons of Yorkshire who, at different stages, both appeared willing allies for this tattooed machine.

When he came off to the acclaim of all of Headingley, he could hardly have told you how the winning runs had come about. He certainly couldn’t have recalled quite how Leach had survived – he couldn’t watch himself.

Everyone else, however, from Trevor Bayliss to Justin Langer and all those invested around the world: they could have told you everything.

The difference between adrenaline and ordinary fandom in a nutshell. Right there. He will have to watch the highlights back just to understand what he achieved. He will be watching for the first time. We, on the other hand, will look back on it all because we want to relive that anguished thrill again and again.

The switch-hit. That switch-hit. Bloody hell, that switch-hit. He ended up on his backside, popping back up into the stance of a right-hander. A daredevil stunt of outrageous conception. How about Cummins’ over, when Stokes chose to take down the world’s premier bowler? What about that pair of reverse-sweeps, both of which failed to come off as the scoreboard ticked down beneath twenty and into single figures?

^{This latest act of heroics came just a month after he had dragged England to World Cup glory}

At the back of the commentary box, you could hear the gasps and the chuckles. The gasps of Nasser Hussain, the chuckles of Shane Warne. Two men who know how these games between these teams have tended to end.

Even Stokes admitted it. The one time that his cloak of adrenaline threatened to tug itself from his hold came as the intangible shifted into the tangible. Single figures are scary times. Sixty is a miracle; ten is more than a chance. One ball for the fielding side becomes, potentially, two hits for the batting team.

Adrenalin threatened to spill over into logic. And once there’s logic, once more there’s danger. Because logic demands that nothing of the previous hour possibly be feasible. No team had been bowled out for as little as 67 and won a Test for 131 years. While there’s adrenaline, everything is in the lap of the gods, in the palms of Stokes’ innate belief. Once logic is involved, it’s game on.

Think even of Marcus Harris’ drop catch, Lyon’s crucial runout spillage, Paine’s desperate waste of a vital review - the kind that could become enshrined alongside tosses at Brisbane and Edgbaston of Ashes gone by, the subsequent poor decision from Joel Wilson that soon followed.

It is an unexplainable pattern of events, all living in amongst a wider chain of madness perpetuated by Stokes. Pressure just does the weirdest things.

The review against Leach – a palpably poor appeal from whichever angle at first view – became a match-losing one when sent upstairs for clarification. For it to have been overturned, the captain was relying on his own eyes deceiving him.

Perhaps, given what he had become accustomed to as Stokes set sail on this crazy voyage, he believed there was every chance that his eyes had, indeed, been playing tricks all along.

Maybe, if he railed against Chris Gaffaney’s decision, this whole extraordinary nightmare would come to an end. He would wake up; England would be 40 runs short and the Ashes would be retained before the end of August.

Well, no. Because Stokes wasn’t done yet. That tank of adrenaline had a drop remaining. And with that, he drilled Cummins through cover for four.

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