England’s captain Ben Stokes faces his biggest challenge yet as a leader on how to motivate his players for the Lord’s Test after the huge loss at Edgbaston, writes Michael Atherton, the former captain.
“In the three years that Ben Stokes has captained England, it is hard to think that he has faced a sterner challenge than over the next two days, as he contemplates how to lift his players for the third Test at Lord’s. It will be a massive test of his leadership, and his own mental and physical resilience,” Atherton wrote in his The Times column.
The pre-series talk in England’s media had revolved around the Ashes, rather than focusing on the India series. Quite a few former players kept talking about the series in Australia, as if India series was just a preparation. Now, things are changing – and how.
Atherton makes his point on why the next two days before the third Test is vital, and he uses Stokes’s own words before the second Test to make his point. “I used the three days after that game [at Leeds] to offer absolutely nothing to the world. I was a shadow of my normal self,” Stokes had said a day before the second Test.
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Atherton quotes Stokes and then makes the following observation: “It is not hard to imagine, then, how he must be feeling now. There was a gap of seven days between the first and second Tests … The three days that Stokes used to shut himself off from the world after Leeds for his own benefit, are essentially the days he must use now to rally his players. His workload at Edgbaston was not dissimilar. He spent 25 overs longer in the field; he bowled nine overs fewer and batted 16 minutes less. Defeat, of course, exacerbates matters. If he was feeling knackered after a win at Leeds and with a seven-day break, how must he have been feeling on Monday morning with the Lord’s Test three days away?”
Terming the second Test defeat as “punishing”, Atherton called for couple of changes for the Lord’s Test.
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“I’d keep faith with the batting and freshen up the seam attack, bringing in [Jofra] Archer and [Gus] Atkinson for Josh Tongue and Brydon Carse.” Archer is coming back from an injury, and so is Atkinson, who hasn’t played a game since tweaking his hamstring against Zimbabwe six weeks ago. Atkinson has a good record at Lord’s, picking up 19 wickets at an average of 10.94 in his two Tests.
