Believe it or not, at the start of Ben Stokes’ innings his Test batting average was closer to Graeme Swann’s than Joe Root’s.

Since Alastair Cook’s retirement from Test cricket in 2018, Stokes has generally been regarded as England’s best batter after Root and for a brief period in 2020, even above Root in the pecking order, but the numbers don’t back up what we see with our eyes.

Often, he is described as a ‘moments’ cricketer. A player who produces on-field miracles, someone whose true worth can never be represented by a few rows of statistics. That is a fair assessment, and it’s not a bad thing to be; when a player retires, you remember their best performances, not the contents of the fifth column on their ESPNcricinfo profile.

But does being a ‘moments’ cricketer really preclude someone from building up a body of work that gives a genuine sense of their ability? In Stokes’ case, with the ball, perhaps. As a percentage of his spells, he must be handed the ball in lost causes and hopeless cases more often than any other seamer in the world game. When a the game is drifting or a partnership needs breaking, that’s when he gets a go. And then when a game is cracked open, it’s over to the frontline options to clean up. There is a logical explanation as to why his bowling average might take a hit. With the bat, though, should he really be averaging 36 after 78 Tests?

From the summer of 2019 to the start of his first break away from the game a year later, he reached a peak few players in the history of the game have managed; a period that saw him average 53.16 with the bat and 29.29 with the ball in Test cricket.

His destructive century at Barbados today was his first real marker of a return to that kind of form, as he bent the second half of the second morning to his will.

Although it might have done so by the end of his innings, it didn’t always feel inevitable that today would be a day added to Stokes’ greatest hits playlist. After 55 balls, his card was more Leesian than Stokesian with just 23 runs to his name. The shots that brought him those runs were sublime, straight out of the Stokes playbook; imposing, powerful drives of the kind that push bowlers off their desired lengths.

Between those shots, though, there was still the odd sign of a batter who averaged 24.40 across 20 innings since the start of last year. In particular, there were awkward advances down the track to Jason Holder that served no obvious purpose. There were a handful of nervous moments and near misses, twice coming close to playing on but in general, he was watchful and respectful towards West Indies’ premium bowlers in Holder, Kemar Roach and Jayden Seales, all of whom boast outstanding home records.

He chose his moment to pounce perfectly, launching a violent attack against the unthreatening finger spin of Permaul and the errant pace of Joseph. England piled on 86 in that second hour, the majority off Stokes’ blade as he came within a whisker of becoming the first English batter to score a century before lunch from a standing start.

Perhaps most encouraging was the way he dialled down the aggression after lunch when Seales, Roach and Holder returned to the attack. It hinted that the morning counter-attack was a calculated assault, rather than a mindless, adrenaline-induced barrage. In the end, it was Kraigg Brathwaite who brought an end to his innings with Stokes giving the impression that he was insulted that he was facing such bowling in a Test match.

Few players are capable of moving a match on like Stokes is. Rishabh Pant comes to mind, but there are few others around. It might not look it given the scorecard and the flatness of the pitch, but it was important in the context of the match, putting England into a position where they felt comfortable enough to declare with over an hour to go in the evening session – something not to be sniffed at given their sedate start on Wednesday morning.

Stokes’ record at five for England is actually decent without any qualification; an average of over 40 and, perhaps more interestingly, a strike rate only just above 50. Sometimes you sense with Stokes that his vast ability can occasionally be a hindrance. When you possess so many weapons, how do you know which one to use at a given time? More limited players don’t have to run through so many options in the split second they have to decide which stroke to play. There was one shot today – a lofted drive over mid-off relatively early in his innings – that few batters in the world would even consider, let alone play.

The beauty of Stokes in full flow is that even when he’s scoring at a strike rate of 140 – as he did in that second hour – it doesn’t look like he’s taking undue risks. Over the last year or so, and in Australia in particular, it sometimes felt as if he’d momentarily lost his instinctive feel for the rhythm of an innings, something he had in spades today. For all the talk of moving on and introducing new faces, nothing can elevate the standing of this England team more in the short-run than a return to form for Stokes, where he is more than a reactive ‘moments’ player, but rather someone who controls matches from the moment of his introduction. There were mitigating factors for his dip last year, human reasons why he wasn’t at his very best. Today suggested that form of 2019 and 2020 could be just round the corner, and if it is, after a grim year, better days for England lie ahead.

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