As sports fans, we are conditioned to expect the unexpected. While victory remains a possibility – however distant – and defeat is not yet final, we all nurture the tiny, flickering hope that a sporting miracle will occur. And though we all have an inner voice cautioning us “it ain’t going to happen” – every now and then it does.
Victory against all the odds has become a deep-rooted part of our sporting birthright – in some ways its very essence. Ben Stokes, with his fantasy innings in Leeds last Sunday is now firmly cemented onto his plinth in the English sporting Pantheon; and what he did was remarkable — but also entirely in keeping with our traditions.
Sport is the theatre of the improbable. Only a few months ago, Liverpool came back from a 3-0 deficit to beat Barcelona 4-0 in the Champions League semi-final. Something that the pundits thought virtually impossible happened in front of our eyes.
Across sport the players lay before us one unlikely triumph after another; as spectators we gasp and applaud, shower the victors with laurels and sit back, waiting for the next marvel. We don’t know where, when or which sport will deliver – but we know it will happen some time. And it is this unpredictability which keeps us interested; the occasional triumph of the underdog gives savour to life.
Stokes’ glorious innings was so striking because it combined attributes which seem antithetical; he started, with England in a precarious position — and with evening coming on — conservatively, cautiously and responsibly, and finished, in the high heat of the following afternoon, with a magnificently swashbuckling onslaught. A perfect innings which had even grouchy old Boycott reaching for his thesaurus of superlatives: when the patron saint of Yorkshire pessimism is showering you with compliments, no further proof is needed that something truly remarkable has happened.
It was also a feat which conformed with English sporting history and, thereby, with our history more generally. Because sport – however much some soulless types condemn it as trivial – illuminates important aspects of the national character.
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