Ben Stokes’ ODI retirement should act as the perfect wake-up call for cricket’s myopic administrators-Opinion News , Firstpost

Ben Stokes played his final ODI against South Africa at Chester-le-Street in England. AP

Take a moment and allow this to just sink in: Ben Stokes announced his retirement from 50-over internationals one day after the conclusion of an ODI series AND one day before the start of another.

Now, think about this again. Two one-day international series with merely a day in between. Take away the unprecedented heat wave in England with the temperature hovering around the 40-degree Celsius mark. Take away the fact that the next 50-over World Cup is a good 15 months away. What is a team doing, playing two three-match ODI series against two different countries in the space of 13 days?

The seismic aftershocks of Stokes’ dramatic decision haven’t reverberated as resoundingly elsewhere as in England, which is understandable. There is so much cricket going around these days that sides have little time to reflect on what they have done yesterday, so it is no surprise that they are less seized of what’s happening elsewhere. England, of course, will take time to come to terms with the fact that their talismanic all-rounder, the new Test skipper who has helmed four extraordinary chases this summer alone, the man who hauled them all the way to the 50-over World Cup at home in 2019, will no longer be a part of their 50-over set-up.

Stokes isn’t the first big name to sever ties with ODI cricket to prolong his career. More than 15 years back, Anil Kumble called it quits from the 50-over game after the ill-fated 2007 World Cup so that he could pursue the format dearest to his heart – the five-day game. Towards the end of 2012, Sachin Tendulkar bid adieu to ODIs in a last-ditch effort to keep the passion for Test cricket alive. At the time of his retirement, Kumble had 334 wickets, which is still an Indian record; Tendulkar had amassed 18,426 runs, comfortably the most in ODI history.

Yet, if their retirements didn’t quite rock the cricket world as much, it was because they were closer to the end of their careers than the beginning. Kumble was 36 when he moved on from ODIs, and went on to play Test cricket for a year and a half thereafter. Tendulkar, a wizened 39 at the time, played a mere 11 months of Test cricket after quitting the 50-over format.

Stokes, however, is only 31. Surely, that is no age to give up one variant so he can focus on the other two in vogue internationally?

And therein lies the tale, one suspects.

At the time of Kumble’s retirement, T20 cricket had yet to grab the imagination. And while Tendulkar was an integral part of the Indian Premier League, his international T20 appearances were restricted to a grand total of one. They had to make a choice between one format or the other. Now, needless to say, so many more options abound.

Apart from the three prevalent at the highest level, there is The Hundred, an English innovation that makes little sense or serves little purpose beyond the commercial. Cricket West Indies are to unveil a 60-ball shootout next month, and a T10 league of no little standing is already going strong in Abu Dhabi. It’s unlikely, if not impossible, that any of these further compacted formats will seep into the international landscape in a hurry, but how’s that any consolation in a day and age where lip service is paid to workload management even as administrators and broadcasters, driven by the desperation to milk the cash cow, seldom walk the talk and cram the calendar with meaningless cricket?

From the moment T20s captured the mind space of the cricket fan, its 50-over sibling faced a future of uncertainty. T20s were initially meant to draw newer, fresher, hitherto untapped audiences to a sport that was meandering through a morass of indifference, especially in England. Its pioneers might not have bargained for the mass appeal it generated in very little time, but as its popularity burgeoned with every soaring hit and every Super Over, the relevance of the longer white-ball format came more and more under scrutiny.

Fears that Test cricket might suffer at the hands of the white-ball upstarts have largely remained unfounded, thankfully. Some of the most valuable and marketable faces of world cricket, Virat Kohli included, have gone out of their way to espouse the primacy and significance of the long-form game which examines facets of one’s character and skills more uncompromisingly than any limited-overs enterprise ever will. Stokes’ reaffirmation of his desire for Test cricket is another step in the right direction, but his premature exit from ODIs is the most visible and alarming indication yet that the 50-over game has lost its inherent appeal and charm, and must rediscover itself if more worthies are not to follow in his wake.

Players don’t mind the bilateral hit-and-giggle 20-over skirmishes because they come thick and fast and yesterday is history long before the sun has gone down. That isn’t to say that they aren’t invested skill or commitment-wise to three and a half hours of high-octane action. But when they are required to do the same for twice the period in a non-World Cup game, say, devoid of context and importance, it’s inevitable that motivation and drive will take an emphatic back seat.

As it is, the 50-over version has hardly been given a chance to edify itself. There is a sameness to the conditions worldwide that preclude the charm and drama of playing in different countries, and the introduction of two new balls has further emboldened batsmen to tee off on flat tracks with nary a fear of failure. Bowlers have been reduced to bowling machines, the middle overs are marked by dreary ennui and the surfeit of ‘maximums’ – oh, that horrible word – hangs heavy around the neck.

It won’t be long, one suspects, before the specialists take over if the current pace of crammed calendars and unforgiving schedules doesn’t slow down. Even so, it will require a special kind of beast with a penchant for punishment to keep pursuing the seven-hour backbreaker. The profusion of T20 leagues worldwide is the perfect recipe to divorce oneself from the unrewarding 50-over game and juggle interest and investment between the longest and the shortest variants. Stokes’ unexpected call has the potential to shock the administrators out of their reverie and address the growing inequality between cricket’s three primary formats, but don’t hold your breath.

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