Long before he led the dawning of the age of Bazball, Ben Stokes played a significant role in creating Bavball in a game in which the Englishman epitomised Bazball. January 5 2016, fourth day of the New Year’s Test at Newlands and Temba Bavuma inside edges Stokes past his stumps.
The camera swings to Stokes, as it must, and he says, slowly and deliberately in case Bavuma isn’t clear about how he is thinking: “You are absolutely shit.”
Bavuma then went on to score a maiden Test hundred that further put the shits up Stokes and England, as SA declared on 627/7. Stokes had done Bavuma and SA a hell of a favour with just four words.
“‘You are so shit, I don’t know what you are doing here,’ Stokes said to me,” Bavuma reported to ESPNcricinfo a few months later. “If he’d said that earlier, it wouldn’t have made a difference, but after that I just decided I was going to play because it stung a bit.”
Bavuma had been on eight at the time. He scored his 50 with 11 fours before reining himself in as he eased towards his century. It was a ton borne of pressure and celebrated with relief after the selectors had decided to drop JP Duminy and keep Bavuma.
“I’ve never admitted this, but I was feeling the pressure. I needed to repay their favour. I thought to myself that this could be the end of Temba Bavuma,” he told ESPNcricinfo.
Stokes was one of the first to shake Bavuma’s hand after the day’s play had come to an end. Bavuma, finally given the Test captaincy, possibly a few years too late, has become an admirer of Stokes, a silent admirer, he admitted to Don McRae of the Guardian in March.
“He was really good,” said Bavuma. “He’s a tough competitor, a match-winner in all respects, the type of guy you want in your team any day of the week. I’ve enjoyed my battles with him and he’s got the better of me probably more than I have of him. I’m a big silent supporter of Ben Stokes — both the cricketer and also the way they’ve gone about reshaping their Test team.”
It is sometimes overlooked that Stokes put on one of the greatest batting performances of modern Test cricket in that 2016 Newlands Test. He belted 258 off a bowling attack that included Kagiso Rabada, Morné Morkel and Chris Morris.
For 281 minutes and 191 balls he went hard at SA, smashing 18 fours and two sixes. The day before, the first of the Test, with England in trouble, he and Jonny Bairstow had given them room to breathe with 150 in the final session. To start the second day, Stokes hit five boundaries in the first two overs.
It was, perhaps, that attitude and desire to take the game forward that made Brendan McCullum believe he could change how England played and approached the game.
Bazball may have been born in the same match as Bavball. Witness the glorious uncertainty and the maelstrom that was the first Ashes Test this week. An early declaration was said to be either “bold or brainless”, but Test matches won in the final hour of five days of play are the greatest of joys for cricket fans. Stokes made the game happen, he forced Pat Cummins to duke it out at the death.
“If you fail, then you fail. So what?” Stokes said just before the Test started. “The bottom line is, everybody fails at some point, so you might as well go out batting the way you want to. That won’t change just because it’s the Ashes. We’ll move on, we’ll go to sleep and we’ll wake up the next day, hopefully with the sun shining, and we’ll just go again.”
Bavuma agreed. He wants his Proteas to follow suit, to find their new way, one beyond the fear of defeat, the greed of holding on to a place in the team for the sake of it and the wonder of what might have been.
“It starts by challenging ourselves,” he told McRae. “The conversations have already started within the team and we speak more in terms of guys going out and expressing themselves. I guess that’s general clichéd stuff.
“But if the opportunity is there to take the game we have to be brave and confident enough to do so. With Test cricket, you’ve got to find that balance between absorbing pressure and then applying pressure on the opposition.”
Bazball? Keep an eye out for Bavball.
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