Ben Stokes, hero of the new miracle of Headingley

The Oval, 1902. Headingley 1981. Melbourne 1982. Edgbaston 2005. And now Headingley 2019. Move over Sir Ian Botham, you’ve got company and there’s a new king in the north. This astonishing, heart-stopping, game will forever be remembered as Stokes’s match and recalled for as long as test cricket is still played and savoured. For a game perpetually teetering on the edge of crisis, cricket’s in pretty good shape when it comes at you like this.

Ben Stokes has now, as everyone agrees, played two once-in-a-lifetime innings in six weeks. The World Cup final was one thing; this was improbability on an altogether different, still more elevated, level. England’s final pair, Stokes and dear Jack Leach, added 76 runs to see England home. More than the entire XI managed in their miserable first innings of 67. That 67 is the lowest innings made by a victorious side since, I think, the nineteenth century.