Ben Stokes: England’s win-or-bust mentality is opening sport as much as new followers
And, with just one aspect in Ashes historical past having beforehand come again from 2-0 all the way down to win 3-2 – Don Bradman’s workforce in 1936-37 – the Lord’s Test would possibly ordinarily really feel like a match that England dare not lose.
Stokes, nevertheless, insisted that he and his gamers are totally unfazed by the prospect of bouncing again to sq. the sequence 1-1, and mentioned that the general public’s enthusiastic response to the workforce’s “Bazball” ways will solely embolden him for the remainder of the marketing campaign.
“We got a nice little break, and there’s been lots of people come up to me and saying how enthralled they were with last week,” he added, after a visit to Seaham Hall in Durham, the place he’s an envoy. “They obviously wanted us to win but they just loved every minute of it.
“I had a dialog in a males’s changing-room at a spa concerning the sport, which was a bit awkward. He mentioned, ‘are you the cricketer or do you simply appear to be him?’ and I used to be like ‘it’s me’.
“He just said that ‘I went down to the pub after work and I don’t even follow cricket, but I was just going to go down for a quick few’ and he ended up having a few more, and just said he was just transfixed on the game.
“So whenever you hear stuff like that, it clearly makes you be ok with what we’re doing as bringing a brand new fanbase to the sport, and it is reaching those who it’d by no means have reached earlier than, so that is what we’re about.”
The onus on opening the game up to a wider audience feels all the more important following the overnight publication of the long-awaited ICEC report into the sport’s structural inequalities.
“It was mainly about ‘we’ll see’, one factor occurs and may not imply it is the tip of the tip of the world,” Stokes said. “You do not know why issues occur, if it is for an excellent motive or not, it is simply a type of issues to cope with. The workforce we have picked, I’m very assured we will stroll away from right here with a win. Rather than fear about issues that I haven’t got, I’d reasonably be assured within the issues I do have.
“I don’t want to get misheard when I say we aren’t a results-driven team,” Stokes added. “As I said last week, losing sucks. We always want to win every game we play, but if we don’t come away with the win at the end, then let’s move onto the next game and let’s keep going.”