Ben Stokes was surrounded. Rishabh Pant and Yashasvi Jaiswal seemed convinced that he had edged Washington Sundar down the leg side in the over before lunch, and Indian fielders converged on England's captain. Ravindra Jadeja pointed to Stokes' thigh pad. Shubman Gill decided against using his final review. Stokes chewed his gum, hand on hip, and glared.
One ball later, India's fielders went up in appeal again. Stokes was dumbfounded when umpire Sharfuddoula raised his finger, and held out his left hand in bemusement before reviewing. But the decision was spot on: the DRS confirmed that Sundar's in-drifter had hit his pad before his bat. He shook his head as he walked off, past a fan waving an India flag in Edgbaston's South Stand.
Stokes' innings was a grimly compelling watch, a public disavowal of his previous stance that he is "not interested" in drawing Test matches as captain. With every high-elbow defence and exaggerated leave off the seamers, he made ever more clear the extent to which his team had been backed into a corner by India. After three years, the option of last resort had finally arrived.
The trouble for Stokes was that Gill knew he could attack him with spin. Stokes never settled in England's run chase in Leeds, compulsively reverse-sweeping: he played the shot 16 times in 51 balls, the last of which brought about his dismissal. He has always been a stronger player against pace but his numbers against spinners have fallen off a cliff.
Here, Stokes put his reverse-sweep away against Jadeja, but was never in control. He shifted his guard, batting across his stumps, and was caught between stools when confronted with a rough patch outside off. He lunged forward to sweep, missing as many as he hit, and gloved one ball just short of Gill at leg slip as he looked to defend.
Just briefly, Stokes had started to look like his old self when back-cutting, driving and pulling Mohammed Siraj for boundaries, finally exerting his dominance on a bowler. But his dismissal to Sundar felt almost inevitable: 16 of his 25 Test dismissals since the start of last year have been to spinners, and he is averaging 18.43 against spin in that time. It has been a barren run.
Stokes has had a bad week in Birmingham. He took five wickets in the first Test at Headingley but admitted that bowling 35 overs left him as "a shadow of my normal self" and after 15 more on day one at Edgbaston, managed only 11 overs thereafter. Uncharacteristically, he seemed to run out of ideas in India's second innings as the game drifted slowly further away from him.
His decision to bowl first at the toss backfired, with India enjoying the best batting conditions and grinding England into the ground. "As the game got deeper and deeper, it was pretty obvious that [the pitch] was not playing the way that we thought it was going to," Stokes said. Brendon McCullum was even clearer, saying: "We probably got it slightly wrong."
India's relentlessness with the bat left England facing an unprecedented situation under Stokes' captaincy, attempting to bat out the final day to secure a draw with a win off the table. "The task today was batting out the 80 overs," he said. "The result we always try to push towards and look forward [to] was beyond [us]... It just wasn't meant to be."
His team now face a quick turnaround to Thursday's third Test at Lord's. Stokes does not expect the 336-run margin of defeat to affect their performance next week, but he needs to step up with the bat: Gill, his opposite number, does not look like a natural leader in the field, but his runs have bought him scope to make mistakes that Stokes is not giving himself.
The opening day of this match marked the two-year anniversary of Stokes' most recent Test hundred, a rage-fuelled 155 in defeat to Australia at Lord's, and he has not scored a century in any format of the game since the 2023 World Cup. He declined the opportunity to play for Durham or England Lions ahead of this series to manage his body, but his batting has suffered.
Since the start of last year, Stokes has faced only 1280 balls in professional cricket, limited heavily by knee and hamstring injuries; the next fewest among England's top seven is Zak Crawley with 2414, while Joe Root has faced 4,523. If batting is a skill that relies on rhythm and tempo, then Stokes has been dancing to a very different tune.
Stokes shrugged off a post-match question about his own form with the bat but his five Test scores this year read 9, 20, 33, 0 and 33, and his career batting average has dipped to its lowest mark (35.31) since the 2019 Ashes. He has been an inspirational and tactically astute captain, but Stokes' leadership alone cannot mask his struggles with the bat.
