Ben Stokes, Ravindra Jadeja and the psychology of a cricket all-rounder, one of sport’s toughest jobs

One more over, then he was done. And then one more. And one more. And one more.

As England desperately ploughed towards victory against India on the final day of the third Test at Lord’s, Ben Stokes kept bowling.

He sent down 24 overs in India’s second innings, 18.2 of which came on the final day. This is on top of the 20 he bowled in the first innings, picking up five wickets across the match.

Which would be impressive enough if he hadn’t also scored 77 runs (only Joe Root managed more for England) in the match. And was responsible for maybe delivering the turning point in the whole thing; running out the dangerous Rishabh Pant just as he looked like he was taking the game away from England in the first innings.

Oh, and throw in being captain too.

It’s no wonder he said, after the match, that he would need four days in bed to recover. It shouldn’t really be something that a normal cricketer can do.

But then again Ben Stokes isn’t a normal cricketer. He’s an all-rounder, for a start.

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“If it all comes together, when you have a game where both bat and ball are working, that’s when you feel like Superman.”

Shane Watson is from Queensland, rather than Krypton, but throughout a career that lasted two decades, saw him play 59 Tests and 248 white-ball games for Australia, plus win the Indian Premier League player of the tournament twice, he managed cricket’s equivalent of donning the cape: being an all-rounder.

There is something about the all-rounder that confers superhero status. These are people who look at a game with two main, very distinct skills, and rather than sensibly picking one, think ‘nah, I can do both of those’.

Often, on paper, their statistics might not look much. But it is often these superheroes to whom we turn for big moments, when our team needs to be saved. Particularly, for some reason, in the England team.

Ian Botham had the 1981 Ashes, when he won Tests with wickets and runs. Andrew Flintoff’s equivalent was 2005. After England had beaten Australia in the second Test at Edgbaston, ‘Freddie’ turning the game with bat and ball, the front page of The Daily Mirror mocked up a picture of him as Mr Incredible — with the obligatory pun headline, ‘MR INFREDIBLE’.

Happy birthday @flintoff11!

One of the greatest overs ever bowled… pic.twitter.com/UcCVBbrlPa

— England Cricket (@englandcricket) December 6, 2022

And then there’s Stokes: his signature batting performance, the cricketing equivalent of swooping down from the sky to stop an asteroid hitting a school, came in 2019 at Headingley. But it is easily forgotten that, with England’s key bowler Jofra Archer off the field, he sent down a heroic, unbroken 15-over spell, taking three key wickets and ensuring that he merely had to produce a miracle with the bat, rather than the impossible.

His feats against India at Lord’s won’t quite go down in history like that day six years earlier. But that desire to be the main character, to be the one who takes it upon himself, to be a superhero, was still there.

“The game was on the line and nothing was going to stop me bowling,” he said.

Cricket is hard enough when you only have one thing to think about. These are the people who deliberately make it harder for themselves by choosing two, at least. Which leads you to wonder: why? What goes through the head of the all-rounder?

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“The truly great all-rounder probably is the rarest of all cricketers,” wrote John Arlott in the introduction to his 1971 book, The Great All-Rounders. “The batsman who can bowl or the bowler who can bat will not do: the truly great all-rounder is of Test match quality as both batsman and bowler.”

It is not feasible for a modern cricketer to only be good at one thing. The days of the bowler who sends down their overs then hides on the boundary, or can get away with being a walking wicket when they bat at No 11, have long gone.

But while the minimum expectation is to at least be competent at the tertiary aspects, those who aspire to be one of Arlott’s rarest of all cricketers are something different.

It seems to start with a mentality, an attitude to invite the sort of pressure that being involved in the game all the time brings, to be part of every bit of the action. Or, if you will allow this, a pretty big dollop of “main character” energy.

“If you ask any professional athlete, they want to be involved,” says England batter and off-spinner Alice Capsey, 20. “That’s one of the psychological traits that gets a player with talent into the kind of player ready to play professional cricket. That kind of desire to be in those big moments, to want to perform, to want to kind of be that person to change the game.

“That’s no different from a mindset of an all-rounder as well.”

A huge amount of mental strength is required, but there is a flip side to that, too.

The dilemma of the polymath is not just confined to sport: every actor-writer-singer-director will have, at some point, wondered what might have been had they just concentrated on one thing, poured all of their creative and emotional energy into a single art form. Maybe they would have won that Oscar, or played Alexander Hamilton, or headlined Glastonbury.

Moises Henriques played four Tests for Australia and has since made a fine career on the Twenty20 circuit. The 38-year-old is playing for Nottinghamshire in England this summer.

“I never wanted to, and I was never a big enough character to just want to concentrate on one thing,” he says, suggesting that it takes a form of moral courage and conviction to put all of your cricketing eggs in one basket.

There must be many moments for the all-rounder when you trudge back into the dressing room after a hard day in the field, and you witness your fellow bowlers take off their boots, go for a shower, put their feet up, maybe even take a nap, and you think… yeah, that does look quite appealing. Does that ever happen for Henriques?

“Not ‘did I ever’, but every single time I come off the field I think: ‘God, that would be good’,” he says. “But I don’t want to give away what I’ve got, just so I can relax like that. I definitely feel ‘jeez, it’d be good just to slide down the order here’, for maybe an hour, but I wouldn’t want to do that at the expense of having an opportunity to go out and bat as well.”

The other obvious appeal of being an all-rounder is that you get two goes at being useful, something that Capsey describes as being a “perk” of the role.

It’s something that Stokes alluded to after his performance against India.

“Being an all-rounder, if one thing doesn’t click, you have an opportunity with another and that’s how I look at it,” he said. “I would like to be scoring more runs but when I have my whites on and am out on the field, my thoughts go to bowling. You don’t really have a chance to worry.”

“It’s the reason I wanted to be an all-rounder,” adds Watson. “It all just came down to knowing that no matter what the situation of the game is, if I miss out with a bat, then I can still hopefully have an impact with the ball and have an impact on the game.”

And that in itself brings with it a practical, career-savvy motivation for the all-rounder, especially in the franchise era: it makes you more valuable. In the 18 seasons of the IPL, the most expensive player has been an all-rounder on 11 occasions.

“If you are looking at players in a draft,” says Capsey, “you’ve got so many great overseas players that if you’ve got a few more skills in your repertoire, where people can say ‘this person can bowl in the power play, can bowl in different phases of the game, but also bat in the top five’, they’re a really valuable player to to have in your side.

“From a really selfish point of view, being an all-rounder definitely helps with getting those kinds of gigs.”

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Of course, it might have been all about India’s Ravindra Jadeja at Lord’s on Monday.

India’s spinner did not have the most productive of Test matches with the ball, taking a solitary wicket from his 20 overs. But, when called upon with his team 71 for five in the last innings, he scrapped, battled and edged the tourists agonisingly close to their target of 193. His dogged unbeaten 61 came from 181 balls. He had scored 72 from 131 first time round.

When the last wicket fell, Jadeja was helpless and distraught at the non-striker’s end.

Stokes may have stolen the limelight at the death, but this was a Test match which showcased the abilities of two all-round talents. Players upon whom their sides leant heavily.

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In baseball, cricket’s cousin in the ‘bat and ball’ game family, the single player who can do both is a rare comet, streaking through the night sky every century or so. The ‘two-way’ player was pretty common in the sport’s early days — Babe Ruth, still regarded as among the greatest hitters of all time, 90 years after he retired, was initially a pitcher and did both for a few years — but in the modern game it has essentially disappeared.

It is challenging enough to do either discipline, so to do both is simply too hard at the top level.

Players will often double up in their youth, but at some point, they will be told to choose. It is why it has taken a physical, technical and mental freak (in the most positive way) like Shohei Ohtani of the Los Angeles Dodgers to make it work.

Cricket, although an endurance sport that can put enormous stress on its players’ bodies, is not as extreme. It’s easier to hit a cricket ball than a baseball. Bowlers generate their pace with the help of a run-up, rather than whip-cracking towards 100mph from a standing start.

Thus, involving yourself in every aspect of the game is more viable. But it is still a huge challenge, especially if you play multiple formats of the game.

“We’ve got a young, young player at New South Wales, Jack Edwards: he opens the bowling, bats at six, he’s one of our best slip fielders as well, and he’s taken on the captaincy,” Henriques says. “He’s going to be an absolute superstar and a fantastic all-rounder, but he plays all three formats and it’s just a lot to take on.

“There’s no mental break in the game for all-rounders across a four-day match. You come off the field after 110 overs, either fielding or worrying about when you’ll get a bowl next, and then you come off and, in my case, because I batted four, I put the pads straight on.”

Cricket is a game of short but intense periods of concentration, especially for batters. The best players have the ability to shut off, to essentially rest their brains when they do not need those periods of concentration, whether that is between innings or even between deliveries.

There are fewer opportunities to do that when you have some bowling to do as well. Jacques Kallis, statistically the greatest all-rounder of all time and the only man to take 250 wickets and score 10,000 runs in Tests, was famously good at that sort of thing. While commentating on the recent World Test Championship final, former South Africa captain Graeme Smith commented that Kallis could “stare at a wall for four hours”.

But for those who do not have that natural ability, they must have to do a lot of mental and psychological work.

“Oh mate, I’ve done s*** loads of work,” says Henriques. “I’ve heard that about Kallis, and about times when they’ve had to wake him up when it’s his turn to bat. I was never someone who could come off the field (from fielding and bowling) and just switch off completely.”

Instead, Henriques developed small techniques to force his brain to take a rest. “I did find that as soon as I put my pads on, I’m a little bit more on edge. So instead of doing that, I’ll get everything ready, but I just wouldn’t put the rest of like my gear on until we’d lose a wicket. It allowed me just to be a bit more relaxed about things.”

Watson is a coach these days, of the San Francisco Unicorns in Major League Cricket, and the psychological aspect of the game, generally, and of being an all-rounder, is something he focuses on.

“That’s where the mental skills training that I give every player I work with is critically important,” he says. “Whether it’s you’re an all-rounder, whether you’re a batter or bowler, it’s really about understanding how to be able to build a bulletproof cocoon around yourself. So then you can just be focused on what you need to at the right times to bring the best version of you to every ball.”

Most Test teams aspire to having at least one top drawer all-rounder, but not that many actually do: England have Stokes; Australia have Cameron Green but back injuries have recently forced him to abandon bowling for the time being; India have a clutch of possibles, including Ravi Jadeja and Washington Sundar; if you shut one eye and squint a bit, you could probably class Marco Jansen as a proper Test all-rounder for South Africa; Bangladesh’s Shakib Al Hasan is still ranked as the fifth best all-rounder in the world but has now retired from international cricket.

But there are not many that fit Arlott’s definition. Perhaps we view the great all-rounders of the past, from Garfield Sobers to Kapil Dev to Keith Miller to Richard Hadlee to Imran Khan, wrongly: they were the exceptions rather than something that can be expected in every generation. It is implausible for there to be multiple elite all-rounders at the same time, given the unlikely confluence of the range of skills required, plus the sort of steel mentality to actually want to do it.

What is interesting is how viable being an all-rounder in Test matches will be in the future, maybe even now, bearing in mind the frantic nature of the international and domestic cricket calendar.

That is in the longest form at least, or if you want to play red and white ball cricket: in T20s, where the money is made, it’s more possible — easier, even. The physical demands are less, the periods of concentration required are shorter, and there are theoretically more opportunities to recover. That might be balanced/cancelled out by the volume of cricket you play, and the many different places you play in, but limiting your formats is one way of making the life of an all-rounder more doable.

“To be a good all-rounder in all of those formats is extremely taxing,” says Henriques, “but if you just minimise it to white ball, then it becomes very manageable.”

Still, though, that desire to be the superhero remains.

“If you want to always be involved in the game,” says Capsey, “your mindset’s better, you’re more switched on, and generally more often than not you perform a little bit better as well.

“Over the last few years of my career, that has put me in pretty good stead for where the women’s game is at now, in front of decent sized crowds and with a bit more publicity and spotlight on the game — having that personality of always wanting to be involved and always wanting to change the game puts you in a really good stead to go out onto the pitch and perform.”

Alice Capsey is back! #T20WorldCup ready! @AliceCapsey | #EnglandCricket pic.twitter.com/forgBndd9r

— England Cricket (@englandcricket) January 6, 2023

Ultimately, the goal is moments.

Just as fans will sit through weeks, months, years of nothingness, in the hope that one day we will feel something glorious, so the all-rounder will cope with the relentless nature of it all — the fatigue and the pressure – to feel the same.

“That’s what you’re chasing, and that’s what I absolutely loved about the challenge of being an all-rounder,” adds Watson. “Yes, you had to train a lot more than others, and yeah, I had injury issues throughout my career. It meant I had to be ultra-diligent and manage myself as well as I possibly could.

“But it was for those days where everything, your batting and bowling, all came together. And it made it all, every moment, worthwhile.”

As Stokes rests in his bed, he will be thinking the same.

(Top photo: Alex Davidson/Getty Images)