Troubled World Cupper to World T20: How psychologist’s advice made Ben Stokes England’s last action hero

On a dry hot July day in London in 2013, Ben Stokes sidled into the seats in the stands at Lord’s, and sat next to the psychologist Mark Bawden. He had struggled through the season, was feeling down with his performance, so much so that his captain at Durham, Paul Collingwood, had texted him, ‘are you ok?’

He wasn’t. But he didn’t want to share his heartache with his team-mates as he didn’t want to short-change his boisterous tattoo-star image. But he realised he had to open up to someone, and he decided Bawden was the go-to man.

Bawden, who has worked with a few English teams, heard him out before giving his verdict that Stokes was suffering from ‘Bottle Bottle Bang’ syndrome’. In normal lingo, it meant Stokes was bottling up his frustrations inside him, and it keeps festering inside until it explodes. He had to lighten up, else the wretched rut would continue. It had been a poor summer mentally and the shot-making ability was on the wane.

And the year had started terribly when in January, he and Matt Coles were asked to leave an England Lions tour of Australia after being caught drinking too late into the night. Andy Flower was one of the personnel involved in taking the tough decision, and he even had a few tough things to say to the youngster. Bottle bottle bang.

Not that he needed just a solitary chat with the psychologist. In March 2014, the frustration of a poor tour in West Indies, saw Stokes punching the locker in the dressing room, breaking his hand, forcing him to miss the World T20. More meet-ups with Bawden took place and he was even given a routine when angry: go to the dressing room and pack up your kit-bag. That packing process apparently has helped Stokes in calming down a few times.

Bawden, the psychologist who helped Stokes, likes to classify his sporting subjects in two types: Assassins (thinkers) and Warriors (feelers). He puts Alastair Cook in the former, and Stokes of course falls in the ‘warrior’ category.

“One thing I try and do is de-myth confidence for people, who often think that confidence is having absolutely no doubt and unbreakable self-belief. In normal life, everybody experiences fear, anxiety and self-doubt,” Bawden once said. “My job is helping people realise that confidence isn’t the absence of fear or doubt, it’s trust in your method.”

More bad things would happen though. We know the backstory: the pub fight that threatened his career, the death of his father, the mental-health struggle, the Test captaincy recharge with Brendon McCullum, the ODI World Cup star, and now the T20 World Cup champion, in a format that Michael Vaughan thought he isn’t enthused about much. Oh, well.

Another T20 final would give him the greatest blues yet. The West Indian Carlos Brathwaite, a batmaker, had smashed the living daylights out of him to win the World T20 final. In a Kolkata minute, things had threatened to turn dire. England had almost two hands on the trophy but Stokes had let the grasp slip, and lost them the trophy. On that night, in the team bus, he couldn’t help refreshing the Twitter feed and was pleasantly surprised to receive more support than abuse. And this time around, he didn’t bottle his emotions, and got over the debacle as soon as it was humanly possible.

More mental health issues would turn up, he would publicly acknowledge them, take a break – a move that Ravi Shastri would praise and use to urge Virat Kohli to take a break lest it gets too much for him. Stokes would come back, take over the Test captaincy, and even if McCullum had any doubts about his approach, Stokes didn’t. Even Joe Root, the former captain, would be moved to say that he has never enjoyed cricket as much as he has done under Stokes.

Now, one thing remained. The T20 World Cup. When he came to the World Cup, he hadn’t played a T20 game in 18 months. Buttler sat him down for a chat. “When we got here, before we’d even had a training session, he sat me down for five or 10 minutes and just said: ‘This is your role, this is what I want you to do,’” he said. “That 10-minute chat just made me really understand the way in which I can affect the game.” And Stokes would deliver what was required of him in that must-win game against Sri Lanka that put England into the semi-finals. And then now, in the final.

That trust in his method that Bawden talked about then has meant Stokes doesn’t get too flustered if he ends up miscuing some of his shots. He poked and missed a few balls from Naseem Shan and Haris Rauf but unlike the young Harry Brook, who tried to counter-attack with a slog, Stokes didn’t lose his head. He would even walk across to Brook to calm him down.

With 38 runs needed off 26 balls, Ben Stokes did a Stokes. Nerveless, ambitious, and one who trusts his own game. Against him was Shadab Khan, a very good leggie. First ball, Stokes backed away to slam it to long-off boundary. Nasser Hussain started to turn into a Bill Lawry on air. The next was a thriller: Stokes backed away, Shadab held his nerve and for a long time, it seemed he had his man. Stokes had heaved it on the up and the white ball seemingly hung in the air. The long-on fielder jumped but grasped thin air. Stokes, and England were away. “What about this bloke Stokes. What about big occasions? Staggering,” Ian Smith as ever with the pithily insightful cries that would stay in the mind for long.

Around Christmas time in 2013, Stokes was walking with his girlfriend Clare – Stokes became a father at the age of 21, and has a son and a daughter – the couple chanced upon Andy Flower in a chat with other coaches. He told Clare that, “I really want to tell him, I told you so, I did have it in me.” Clare restrained him, saying Flower must have used it to motivate him and not to disparage, and Stokes knew she, and Flower, were indeed right.

During that Ashes tour, while taking a single, he had collided with Mitchell Johnson, and got a verbal spray: “What the hell ya doing, ya little sh**?”. As it has turned out, these days Stokes knows exactly what he is doing: scoring runs, taking wickets for England, seizing the big moments, and winning trophies for England.