Ricky Ponting compares Ben Stokes’ match-winning ability to India great: ‘Numbers don’t justify his greatness’

England, who were six down for 193 in the 371-run chase, lost the match by 43 runs only. Stokes’ seventh-wicket partnership with Stuart Broad accounted for 108 runs off 122 balls. The southpaw scored 93 off the 108 runs.

Ponting has marked that the game of cricket hasn’t seen many players, especially captains who have won matches single-handedly for their teams while batting down the order or batting with the tail-enders.

“The first one that comes to mind is maybe someone like a Dhoni, who’s there at the end in a lot of T20 games, and finishing games, whereas Ben’s doing it at the end of Test matches, and there’s not, probably not many, many players through the history of the game that have found themselves in that sort of role and are there at the end winning games, and especially as a captain,” Ponting told on the latest episode of The ICC Review.

Further, Ponting added that the batting and bowling numbers of the England captain don’t justify his greatness.

“We have all over the years really only sort of judged cricketers on their numbers and their stats of what their average is and how many wickets they take,” Ponting noted.

“If you looked at Ben Stokes in that light only, it doesn’t do him full credit to the player that he is as he averages 35 (36) with the bat and 32 with the ball.

“So those numbers alone don’t sort of put him in the highest echelon of players. But when you see him play like he did (at Lord’s) and do some of the things he’s done for this team over a long period of time, then we have to find ways to start measuring cricketers in a better way of how they impact games, how many games they actually can win themselves because he’s an out and out match-winner, that’s for sure.”

“I think any international player is under pressure anytime they walk out to play, but Ben batting in the middle order or later order like he does, probably finds himself in more match-winning opportunity situations than some others might,” Ponting said.

Stokes has played a total of 94 Test matches and scored 5928 including 13 hundreds at an average of 36.36. With the ball, the pacer has picked 197 wickets at an average of 32.07.