‘Tough pill to swallow’: Stokes rues rain after Australia retain Ashes with draw

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After rain washed away all possibility of play on the final day of the fourth Test, and with it England’s chances of winning back the Ashes, Ben Stokes said it had been “a tough pill to swallow”.

He had seen his side put on a performance he described as “pretty much perfect” – in stark contrast to the Australia captain, Pat Cummins, who admitted his team had been “across the board in all facets, not really at our best”. Verdicts rendered all but meaningless by the weekend deluge.

Only 30 overs were possible across the final two days of a match England completely dominated, and none at all on Sunday. The draw means Australia will take a 2-1 lead into the final game of the series, which starts at the Oval on Thursday, and know anything but defeat there would see them win a series in England for the first time since 2001.

It was, Stokes said, “a tough way to not be able to get the urn back”, particularly given the quality of his side’s display. “The first few games we played some brilliant cricket, and we played some cricket that we knew we could have been better at,” he said.

“Whereas this game I can’t actually look back and say: ‘We could have been better there’, because I think we were pretty much perfect throughout the whole game.

“Bowling Australia out and then scoring the runs that we did at the pace that we did – I can’t really say we got anything wrong throughout this game. So yeah, it is a bit tough that we end up with a draw when we dominated the cricket we managed to get in.

“The weather didn’t help us, we can’t change that. It’s a tough pill to swallow, knowing that’s the reason we sit here with a draw. But we’ve done everything we possibly could in the hours of play we managed to get.

“We were completely and utterly dominant throughout the hours of play we had. It’s a shame but, oh well.”

Stokes refused to accept any criticism that his side might have had improved their chances of victory by declaring their first innings, or upping their over rate, in an effort to hurry the game on.

“Regardless of what we did we would have ended up in the same situation,” he said. “I think anyone who is going to question the [lack of] declaration probably doesn’t understand the game as well as we do. We got three hours of cricket in two days. I don’t think, whatever we did, we would have been able to force a result in this game and that is unfortunately due to the weather.”

Cummins said there would be only muted celebrations, with his team still intent on improving on the drawn series they achieved in 2019. “There’ll maybe be a bit of a pat on the back for retaining the Ashes,” he said.

“There’s been a lot of work gone into putting us into a position where a draw does retain the Ashes. But there’s a Test match starting in three days and that’s going to be our full focus. It’s a pretty similar group to 2019 and we all came away from that feeling we’d just missed what we’d come over to achieve. So in some regards whatever happened today wouldn’t change the way we look at next week: we want to win it.”

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England’s mindset will be the same. “It’s very similar to 2019, when we had to win at the Oval to draw the series,” Stokes said. “For us, we’ll have to get over the disappointment of today and then focus on that game. It is a massive game for us and 2-2 sounds a lot better than 3-1.”

But still, the fear is that the rain that fell in Manchester will make the next game, if not quite a damp squib, certainly a lesser occasion than it might have been.

“There’s no doubt if we managed to get a result in this game next week would have been a very, very special week in the history of not just Ashes cricket, but English cricket,” Stokes said. “It would have elevated everything that the series has already done for Test cricket, especially in England.

“But I think what we’ve managed to do has already done wonders for cricket in England. I said in the dressing room that the reward for your work isn’t what you get, it’s what you become. And what we’ve managed to become is a team that people will remember.

“We’ve become a team that have been so unbelievably well followed and we will live long in the memories of those who have watched us.

“As much as I would love to be an Ashes-winning captain, I want this team to be a legacy team. Regardless of how the series ends up, people will always talk about us.”