This is the first Ashes series since 2010-11 not to feature Warner. His spikier tendencies on the field have riled up England multiple times over the years, but one occasion sticks out more than most in Stokes’ mind.
The night before his epic Headingley innings in 2019, Stokes thought he heard Warner make references to the criminal trial that forced the all-rounder’s withdrawal from the 2017-18 tour of Australia. Stokes was found not guilty of affray after an incident outside a Bristol nightclub.
“I had extra personal motivation due to some things that were said to me out on the field on the evening of day three when I was trying to get through to stumps,” Stokes had written in his book about the 2019 series, On Fire: My Story of England’s Summer to Remember.
David Warner and Ben Stokes.Credit: Getty
“A few of the Aussies were being quite chirpy, but in particular David Warner seemed to have his heart set on disrupting me. He just wouldn’t shut up for most of my time out there. I could accept it from just about any other opponent. Truly. Not from him, though.
“To the best of my knowledge, not one of our players had mentioned anything to him or Steve Smith and Cameron Bancroft about the misdemeanours that kept them out for cricket for between nine and twelve months. This hadn’t been a team decision. We just didn’t do it. Why go there?”
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Sitting alongside the fellow not out batsman, Joe Root, Stokes resolved to make it his goal to shake Warner’s hand in victory at the end of the game.
“I muttered ‘Bloody Warner’ a few times as I was getting changed. The more time passed, the more it spurred me on,” Stokes wrote. “All kinds of ideas of what I might say to him at the end of the game went through my head.
“In the end, I vowed to do nothing other than shake his hand and say ‘Well done’ if I could manufacture the situation. You always shake the hands of every member of the opposing team at the end of a match. But this one would give me the greatest sense of satisfaction.”
Asked by this masthead about the episode on Thursday, Warner emphatically denied making any such reference. There were other times during the series when Warner and other players referred to a teammate as “Bristol”, due to an unrelated in-joke, but he insisted he would never have gone out of his way to get Stokes angry.
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Sledging as a whole will be an area of intrigue across the series. In recent years, international cricket has become more and more friendly, partly due to Indian Premier League crossover, and partly because of the risk of sanctions.
Travis Head was pulled up last summer for a foul-mouthed spray to Mohammed Siraj after the end of his century in Adelaide, and said audiences were unlikely to hear much that wasn’t “PG-rated”.
“What can you say? Now with stump mics, it’s a hot as it can ever get. [You] can’t even swear in disappointment and get away with it, it’s turned up to the max,” Head said.
“[Last summer] was somewhat ridiculous, but also it’s needed – you can track what everyone says, and when they turn it up as much as they can, I don’t think anything is going to be [too aggressive]. Everything you say has got to be PG-rated. We’ll see.”
Travis Head and Mohammed Siraj exchanged words after the South Australian was dismissed.Credit: Getty Images
Even so, the examples of a furious-but-focused Stokes hurting Australia did not end in 2019. His irritation about the Jonny Bairstow stumping at Lord’s in 2023 spun off into a pair of brilliant innings, first on the final day of that Test, and then to keep England in the Leeds Test that followed.
On the topic of how such moments had seemed to take him to fresh heights more than once, Stokes gave only a few words on Thursday. But he accompanied them with a piercing stare: “[I’m] just desperate to win.”
