No sooner had the polls closed than the recriminations could begin. Horror and dismay at Katarina Johnson‑Thompson HQ. Rumours Dina Asher-Smith would announce her resignation as early as Monday morning. Sources in the Lewis Hamilton campaign briefing that their candidate’s tax policy had gone down disastrously on the doorstep. Back in the studio, white-haired psephologists feverishly picked over the historic implications of the vote, and in particular the crumbling of Alun Wyn Jones’s “red wall”.
Well, maybe not. And yet, as the ticker tape tumbled in Aberdeen, as Ben Stokes clutched the sports personality of the year trophy in his meaty hands, we were again reminded that public opinion is a strange little egg, a slavering argot you try to decrypt at your peril. It was, we were immediately told via an England and Wales Cricket Board press release, a seismic moment not just for Stokes but for the entire sport. A triumph to inspire the next generation. Coming 14 years since Andrew Flintoff in 2005, the last cricketer to win the award, Stokes’s coronation certainly felt like a vindication of something. But what, exactly?
There are, at the outset, two points worth making. First, the rarity of any cricketer winning what is, at heart, an individual and very public beauty contest. The years since Flintoff’s golden summer have not exactly been strewn with near misses; the recent history of sports personality has served merely to illustrate cricket’s place in the pecking order. Monty Panesar (2006), Andrew Strauss (2009 and 2011), Graeme Swann (2010), Alastair Cook (2011), and Jimmy Anderson (2018) came and went without troubling the scorers. Ian Bell’s Ashes heroics in 2013 were good enough for last place and a derisory 0.78% of the vote.
Anya Shrubsole, the face of England’s last World Cup triumph in 2017, placed ninth (although England did win the team award). None of the 2015 men’s Ashes winners were deemed worthy of consideration. Kevin Pietersen never made the shortlist, nor Stuart Broad, Charlotte Edwards or Sarah Taylor. And so, yes: the ascent of Stokes is an exceptional moment, a testament not just to a unique cricketer but the unique confluence of scheduling and circumstances that brought him to prominence.
All of which leads into the second point: the curiously persistent influence of terrestrial television in moulding our ideas of sporting distinction. In a cluster of tennis players, athletes and cyclists, Stokes is the first athlete since Ryan Giggs in 2009 to reach the summit without the benefit of free-to-air television, unless you count Channel 4’s one‑off broadcast of the World Cup final. Those few hours constitute virtually the entirety of Stokes’s live free-to-air exposure and it’s a fair bet that more people saw him in his suit on Sunday night than have ever watched him in Test whites.
Like so many of English cricket’s lost generation, Stokes has spent the majority of his career plying his trade in a walled garden, unseen and unheeded. And the question English cricket now needs to answer is whether this is a transformative moment or a fleeting cameo in the spotlight; whether its jubilee summer of 2019 is a broad platform, or simply a very narrow plinth.
As ever, this is largely a question of pre-existing outlooks. At the ECB, the last seven months will doubtless be seen as an endorsement of its vision: a process that began in 2015 with the increased focus on England white-ball cricket, continued with its development of The Hundred, and is underpinned by a lionisation of individual heroes and a re-engagement with terrestrial television. In all these respects, it’s possible to argue Stokes is simply the vanguard: the public face of a wider realignment that will reconnect English cricket with its lost public via the medium of 10-ball overs.
Against which, no doubt, will be stacked the traditionalist opposition: here they come now, mongering their doom, saying their nay, stubbornly cleaving to their fusty nostalgia and visceral hatred of progress. They will point out, inconveniently, that Stokes’s agenda-setting achievements just so happened to come in the two oldest formats of the game. And they will argue, irritatingly, that the sports personality vote serves merely to underline cricket’s intrinsic appeal, illustrating what is possible when you reject glitzy gimmicks and put a little faith in the product.
At the nub of this insoluble and frankly rather tiresome debate probably lies something of the truth of the matter. On and on we could go, bickering about how terrestrial broadcasters are not interested in showing Test matches, making snarky jokes about focus groups and how Southern Brave is a stupid name for a cricket team. And doubtless, there will be plenty of time for all this in due course, as next summer’s jamboree heaves into view, as English cricket’s bold experiment begins to feel more like a permanent revolution.
But that can probably wait for now. What this feels like, instead, is a moment to toast a job well done: to salute a cricketer and a team who together scaled the highest peaks. It may have come in a luridly preposterous ceremony with all the enforced bombast of a North Korean military parade. It may ultimately prove as consequential for cricket as AP McCoy’s victory in 2010 did for jump racing, or Zara Phillips’s in 2006 did for eventing. But in a strange way, Stokes’s triumph felt like ours too: the moment, perhaps, when we remembered there is more love for this silly little game out there than we ever realised.
