Stokes won't bowl in fifth Test as long-term call on knee injury looms

As Ben Stokes sweated in the Chennai sunshine earlier this year, he dreamed of spending the final week of July playing a full role with bat and ball while captaining England in an Ashes decider at The Oval. Instead, he spent the eve of the fifth Test bowling offspin in the nets, physically unable to bowl fast.

Stokes has not bowled in this series since the second Test, when he pushed himself through a marathon 12-over spell at the end of Australia's second innings. He was physically spent after that Lord's Test, having batted for five hours across the fourth and fifth days during his 155, and finally admitted at Headingley what had long been clear: he was no longer able to fulfil his role as an allrounder.

That prompted England to change the balance of their side, with Stokes playing as a batter and two allrounders recalled in Moeen Ali and Chris Woakes. They have fared far better with that balance over the last five years and since making the change, have won one Test and been thwarted by the weather after dominating the other.

Stokes will not be bowling at The Oval this week - either seam or offbreaks - and once this Ashes series has been settled, he will have the opportunity to map out his long-term future. He has a diagnosis of his chronic left-knee injury which he has repeatedly refused to reveal publicly and admitted on Wednesday that he may have to consider surgery.

"It's something I obviously want to get sorted," Stokes said. "The times in which I've seen specialists and stuff like that there has been cricket around. So, as it's been manageable, we've just cracked on.

But I think that is a good time to have some serious conversations with medics around what is potentially something I could do to get a role in which I can bowl without having to worry about my knee. Those are conversations we will be able to have in that time off."

Unsurprisingly, Stokes is unlikely to feature for Northern Superchargers in the first weeks of the Hundred, which starts the day after the scheduled fifth day of this Oval Test. "I'm going on holiday after this game," he said. "That's as far as I'm thinking."

There has long been an assumption among England supporters that Stokes will reverse his ODI retirement in time for the World Cup in October-November. But England's white-ball management have long planned on the expectation that he will be unavailable and Stokes reiterated when asked on Wednesday: "I'm retired." He convinced Moeen to play this series under similar circumstances, but joked: "I can't ring myself." There seems little chance of a U-turn.

After this week, England do not play another Test series until January 2024, when they tour India for five matches. "It is a big break - I think the biggest that I will have had in my whole career, except with injury," Stokes said. "You enjoy the periods where you do have a break… but doing this for as long as we have done, you really do miss that environment when you're around the other lads."

He remains determined to play as an allrounder, rather than conceding defeat and becoming a specialist batter: "It's something I've done since I was a kid. Wanting to be involved with the game is something that's got the best out myself. I said in Wellington, after that game, that it has been frustrating in the last couple of years not being able to have the same impact and play the same role that I have done for the last 10 years."

Particularly so because of the toil that went into getting himself fit for the first Test at Edgbaston, where he dismissed both Steven Smith and Usman Khawaja. "The time I spent in India, all the effort that I put in to get to where I was before the series was again another frustrating thing," he said. "When, [despite] all the work you do, your body can let you down at times when you don't want it to."

Stokes is still only 32 but has already put his body through an all-round workload that is matched only by Jacques Kallis in the modern era. He has both faced and bowled over 10,000 balls in Test cricket, a feat achieved only by Kallis and Carl Hooper in the era of reliable ball-by-ball data. "I keep forgetting that I'm aging every day," he said.

He retains ambitions to play in the 2025-26 series in Australia: "How this series has gone and how close we were, it does make you think when we go to Australia, do we have a better chance than the last few times we've been there? Hopefully, it'd be nice to go out to Australia in 2025 and have a good chance of winning."

Stokes has only won one Test series against Australia, back in 2015, but has written his name into Ashes history across the past decade with his miraculous feats with both bat and ball. For a man whose career has been defined by the Ashes, leading a bid to regain the urn down under would be an apt way to sign off.