Debunking the Ben Stokes myth

As I said you are ignorant of cricket history. In Botham we're talking about a player who set loads of records as an all-rounder over many years, not someone who has had one good over. You made the quote: “To be fair, if it wasn’t for the 1981 Ashes, Ian Botham wouldn’t be remembered for much other than hanging around longer than he should have…” That is clearly wrong.

DF - your ignorance is well and truly out in the breeze here mate. Your statistical analysis is ordinary but your knowledge of cricket history is laughable. "To be fair, if it wasn’t for the 1981 Ashes, Ian Botham wouldn’t be remembered for much other than hanging around longer than he should have…" You are aware that Ian Botham was for a time the leading wicket taker in the history of test cricket? Botham held (and maybe still does hold) the record as being the quickest to the test doubles of 100 wickets / 1,000 runs, 200 / 2,000 and 300 / 3,000 in terms of age and number of tests. He scored a 100 and took 5 wickets in an innings on five occasions. No one else has done this more than twice. He was also the first player to score a century and take 10 wickets in a match.

....The Gregster.....four Test hundreds (as many as Watson, or Burge, or McCosker and more than Hughes, Smith, Benaud, Sheahan, Ryder, Barnes, Hilditch, Symonds, Edwards et al) and a Test batting average of 41.08. I bet George Bailey would like some of that. In fact, Greg Mathews has scored more Test hundreds than 378 of Australia's 436 Test cricketers.....and only 47 have scored more Test Hundreds - since 1877.

Apparently he was the first Englishman to score a century and take 6 wickets in an innings in his first four tests since Ian Botham. So that may have brought up some comparisons. And lets face it, Botham will be the comparison point for any pace bowling allrounder that England produce ever.

That is just ridiculous. Removing the century and saying that without it his average would be pretty bad. Let's remove Warners two centuries and not out 80-something because they are outlying events. Oh, his series looks pretty bad now. Let's remove Clarke's two hundreds or Smith's two hundreds. Also pretty bad? The stats are the stats. In fact, that one hundred should carry more significance when you factor in that it was the only century scored by any of England's players in the entire series! I thought it was interesting how they were saying he was the first Englishman to score a century and take 6 wickets in his first four tests since Ian Botham. The last player to do that for Australia was, of course, that great allrounder Michael Clarke with a century on debut and 6/9. Obviously you also get "early in the career" type records and things where names are mentioned and your response is "who?" because they probably only played a few matches and were never heard of again. It's not how a players first series goes but how they develop over a long period of time that they'll be remembered for. But while Stokes also got out cheaply with the bat sometimes (like every other batsman in the series did) he looked harder to get out in most cases than just about all the other English batsmen and having not played the first match was second top scorer at the best average. At the same time, I doubt Australia had plans for him like they had for all the other batsmen. That's one thing that often helps young batsmen have a good first few matches. So calling him the next anything is pretty tough on him. Just let him be who his is and he may well be a very good test cricketer for England yet.

An article without conviction.stokes looks really good with the bat and 'can' become a quality test seamer when he improves his length which he'll probably do.

"The point of the article was to highlight that the hype was ridiculous" The only hype comparing Stokes to Botham is in this article. In humour I thought that you had created the hype then went on to say its ridiculous. There really arent any Botham comparisons here in the UK (you said yourself you didnt really know where it had been written)- not by anyone that any half intelligent cricket fan subscribes to. Is this article comedy (in which case i found it pretty funny) or for real???? If its for real then its fair to say that there is better analysis out there...

Sure, his statistics were nothing special and performances probably don't warrant the Botham comparisons this early in his career, but if you consider them in the context of how abysmally England played during the Ashes and on the other hand, how amazingly well Australia did, it's easy to see that he is a bright young prospect for English cricket. I say this because I think that Ben Stokes showed enough on this tour, on an embattled and defeated team that he has the heart, skill and ability to play test cricket as a high quality all-rounder, maybe not as good as Sir Ian, but good enough to hold down a spot in the side for a long time to come.

I think we need to see him bat after a big night out before we make comparisons to Sir Ian.

Sooooo.... if we're claiming a batsmen's best innings is an "outlying event", then wouldn't it make sense to do the same for Bailey? Which would take is average down to <19. In the interest of rubbing out "outlying events", let's also extract Jorge's Not Out, which would take his average down to circa 15.

Erm, sorry to stop the ribbing fun but there is not the level of hype claimed about Ben Stokes here in the UK. Everyone knows that Ian Botham hunted then ate raw kangaroo steak for Breakfast washed down with a fine red Beaujolais before demolishing the Aussies. Stokes has been fed on lightly grilled lentils and tofu washed down with the milk from a virgin goat every morning

Can't we at least let the bloke start his Test career before we begin picking it apart?! He's played four games & showed his team of seasoned pros how to go about it. The kid's 22 years old. He's made a good start. End of.

Quite correct. Stokes had an OK series that looked great compared to the awful series his compatriots had. Still, he's only young, so that's promising for England.

"Stokes made only one century and averaged a rather Richie Benaud like 22 in the other seven innings." A batting average is a batting average. You can't take someone's hundreds out and then re-calculate the remainder. What does Michael Clarke average when you take out all his 100s? Ponting? Bradman? For the record I liked HOW stokes played but agree that it's a little over hyped at the moment. His 6-99 was off less than 20 overs and 3 wickets were tailenders going the tonk. His 100 was pretty brave in the circumstances as was his 40-odd in Sydney but some of his other performances were pretty ordinary.