Ben Stokes Must Survive The Ashes Series To Give England A Chance

The 2025 remake of The Running Man carries a good omen for English cricket enthusiasts with a left field take on how their country can win the Ashes. Paul Michael Glaser’s original version came out in the same year that Mike Gatting’s tourists claimed the 1986-87 urn in Australia. Arnold Schwarzenegger portrayed a man called Ben, a character who survived multiple elimination attempts, eventually turning the tables on the propaganda and the hunters. Step forward, England’s Marvel lead man, Ben Stokes.

Stokes has been called superhuman by some of his colleagues, and his deeds have all the makings of a movie should he pull off the greatest heist of all. The all-rounder is England’s rebuilt six-million-dollar man, which makes him an enemy of the state in the Australia’s dystopian world. Bazball is a dirty word down under in certain Antipodean circles, a cult that needs scything down.

If push comes to shove, Stokes will have to survive for up to 25 of the most intense days of Test match cricket to get England over the line. That’s five less than Ben Richards, aka Glen Powell, in Edgar Wright’s remake. Early optimism at the Optus Stadium in Perth for the first round of the hunger games is built around the England captain’s ability to hang tough and run in as if his life depended on it.

True to form, the less polite members of the Australian media have been zeroing in on England’s cricket captain as if he were a dead man already. “Kiwi-born Ben Stokes, the King of England’s self-proclaimed re-invention of cricket dubbed ‘Baz Ball’, has sauntered into Perth confident the crazed brand of carefree and careless thrash batting – untested in Australia – will reclaim the Ashes,” claimed The West Australian.

Cheap shots won’t bother the Durham man. Stokes has a granite chin and Australia knows it. Not only can the 35-year-old take the blows, but he can dish them out with interest. Stokes is the Pom (or, more pointedly, the Kiwi-born Englishman) who the Australians would love to have as one of theirs. They won’t admit it. After scoring an anger-fueled 155 at the Lord’s Ashes Test two years ago, Stokes was so close to pulling off another fantastical result.

“He’s an unbelievable player, some of the things he can pull off on this ground and in this game of cricket, he’s a freak….. The way he plays chasing totals, the way he gets it done, it was an incredible knock,” said Steve Smith back in 2023. Smith is the stand-in captain who will come face to face at the toss with the lion-maned colossus of England’s team at Perth tonight.

Australia knows that Stokes can get it done. Witness his incredible 2019 Headingley knock, a monumental solo effort of hitting, placement and an ice-cool nerve. What came before was even more impressive, although its sheer bloody-mindedness doesn’t get the clicks. Stokes bowled 24 overs in a row in Australia’s second innings, a Herculean effort of willpower to give the home side a sliver of a chance. To back that up with a match-winning knock was something more far-fetched than Smith’s sledging of Monty Panesar.

Perth is a happy place for Stokes to start his quest. He first came into England’s Test team in the middle of the 2013 Ashes, where the top order raised the white flag to a rampaging Mitchell Johnson. Pushed into an open field where Jeff Thomson and Dennis Lillee had terrorized many Englishmen, the 22-year-old showed his mettle by standing up to Johnson’s fireballs at the WACA, scoring a brilliant 120. Michael Clarke warned Jimmy Anderson he might get a broken arm, but not many win an arm wrestle with Stokes.

For a man who once broke his own hand punching a locker in the West Indies, Stokes knows how to deal with severe pain. The knee surgery in November 2023 gave him two legs to play on rather than one and a half. He was carried off the field during the Hundred in 2024 after a hamstring tear. It popped again last December. He missed the epic denouement of the epic England and India series in the summer with more collateral damage. English cricket needs their A-list skipper for a whole act where he owns the white lines, not for a handy cameo.

Stokes has been fighting against the pain and the grain to make it for this Ashes. It has been bordering on an obsession. The dark shadow of the last two tours means there is unfinished business.

The 2021-22 Ashes was already a difficult one to navigate after Stokes had taken time out of the game for mental health reasons, a situation exacerbated by a broken finger and Covid-19 restrictions in Australia. On the field, Stokes had never been more muted, struggling in the quagmire for fluency with the bat and having very little influence with the ball. He missed the 2017-18 Ashes entirely because of the fallout from his involvement in a Bristol nightclub incident.

The Ashes 2025 sees Ben Stokes with something to prove on Australian soil. He wants to do it all. “When I do get that ball and bowl eight, nine, 10 overs, it’s purely because I feel like I’m very close to breaking the game open. I want to eke absolutely everything out of this body I can, and I’ll do that in an England shirt.”

The 2025 version of The Running Man has bombed at the box office by all accounts, topped by Now You See Me: Now You Don’t. Stokes has to be seen for all five Tests for England to believe they can win the Ashes.