You don’t usually find out a fifteen-year international career is ending while the bloke’s still got the ball in his hand. But that’s exactly how this went. Sunday morning at Trent Bridge, day four of the decider against New Zealand, Stokes pulled his teammates in before play and told them. Last two days as captain. Last two days in the shirt. He was properly choked up saying it, by all accounts, and just told the lads to go out there and give everything they had left. So let’s have a look at Ben Stokes greatest cricket moments, which the whole of England admires.
- Stokes just told his team mid-match on day four at Trent Bridge that he was retiring. That morning. While the game was still on.
- 7,273 runs, 252 wickets, 14 centuries across 122 Tests. Only Kallis had done the 7,000-run, 250-wicket thing before him.
- Test sixes? 138 of them. That’s the record. And 258 as a number six—highest ever.
- Captained England from 2022, won 11 of his first 13 Tests. Won two World Cups for England (2019 ODI, 2022 T20).
- His last Test ended in a loss. England went down by 160. Honestly, nobody was thinking about the scoreline.
How the Announcement Unfolded?
In his final innings, Stokes came in swinging. Wanted to cause chaos, he said. Got 30 off 20 balls before he was out. In the first innings, he’d managed 15 off 33—not exactly a blaze.
With the ball, it was 4/70 and 2/49. That four-wicket haul in the first dig? That was it. The double. 7,000 runs, 250 wickets. Only Kallis had ever done it.
He walked off after tea. Guard of honour down the middle—umpires, New Zealand’s batters, all of them in on it. His own lads lined up. Joe Root was standing there waiting for him at the end. Root, the captain whose job Stokes had taken over back in 2022. They just… hugged. High-fived. One of those moments where you don’t really need to say anything, do you?
England lost by 160 the next day. But honestly, who was counting that?
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The Numbers Behind Ben Stokes’ Greatest Cricket Moments
The stats, if you want them, are genuinely absurd for a player who spent half his career being judged on heart rather than numbers. 7,273 Test runs, average 34.46, fourteen hundreds. 252 wickets, average 30.98. Only one other man in the history of the format has the 7,000-run, 250-wicket double, and that’s Jacques Kallis, which puts Stokes in about as rare company as Test cricket has to offer. He reached it on day two of this very match, two days before he told anyone he was finishing up. Nobody planned that timing. Cricket just does that sometimes.
Go back to Cape Town for his highest score, 258 against South Africa during the 2015-16 tour, struck off just 198 balls with 30 fours and 11 sixes, years before anyone in the cricket world had started using the word Bazball to describe anything. He and Jonny Bairstow set a world record sixth-wicket partnership of 399 in that same innings, but their world record was officially broken just days ago on June 28, 2026. That’s worth remembering, actually, because it’s easy to think of Stokes as a product of the McCullum era, all aggression and no fear, when really he was already bending matches around himself well before any of that started.
He also leaves as Test cricket’s all-time leading six-hitter, with 138 sixes, a record he took from his own coach, Brendon McCullum, back in February 2023.
Born in Christchurch, New Zealand, he moved to England at age 12 when his father took a rugby league coaching job in Cumbria. Fifteen years total in the international set-up, beginning with the white-ball sides in 2011, Test debut in Adelaide two years after that, straight into an Ashes tour because England clearly already knew what they had.
Building the Bazball Era
April 2022, the captaincy lands with him. He brings in McCullum as coach, and between the two of them they essentially rewrite the rulebook on how Test cricket gets played, results be damned; just go after it. Eleven wins from his first thirteen Tests in the job. That’s not someone growing into a role. That’s someone who already knew exactly what he wanted to do with it.
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Ben Stokes’ Greatest Cricket Moments
None of those numbers, though, are what anyone actually thinks of first when his name comes up. Ben Stokes’ greatest cricket moments, the ones every England fan reaches for first, come down to two specific innings. Lord’s, 2019, World Cup Final, that unbeaten 84 that somehow dragged the whole thing into a Super Over which England then won, the first ever 50-over World Cup for this country. And then a few weeks later, Headingley, 135 not out, a match that by every reasonable measure was already lost, turned into one of the great Test wins anyone in that ground had witnessed. The Ashes stayed alive purely because one man refused to accept it was over. He finished that series as the second-highest run scorer overall, with 441 runs at an average of 55.12.
Add the 2022 T20 World Cup on top, the same year he took the captaincy, and you start to get why people talk about him in the way they do. Richard Thompson, the ECB chairman, called him one of England’s greatest-ever cricketers and one of the defining figures of his generation. Brendon McCullum said much the same, that Stokes had given fans some of the greatest cricket moments England has ever produced and inspired a generation of kids to pick up a bat and play without fear.
Why Ben Stokes Says Goodbye Now?
Ben Stokes says goodbye at a point most players would have stayed for at least one more series. He told Sky Sports it came down to doing what was right for him after a genuinely rough patch, including getting dropped from the second Test at The Oval on disciplinary grounds following a night out after the first Test win at Lord’s, something the Cricket Regulator later said it found insufficient evidence to act on. He’d been burned out, he said, quietly thinking about walking away since that win at Lord’s earlier in the series.
He finishes without ever winning a marquee four- or five-match Test series, which is the one thing missing from an otherwise remarkable run as captain. But that’s a footnote, not the story. The story is someone who spent fifteen years producing moments most players don’t manage once, who decided how and when it would end on his own terms, mid-match, mid-spell, exactly the way he’d done almost everything else throughout his career. Ben Stokes says goodbye this week, but Ben Stokes’ greatest cricket moments are already written into the record books for good.
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Sources and References
- Wikipedia – Ben Stokes
- ESPN Cricinfo – Ben Stokes to Retire from International Cricket After Third Test
- NewsBytes – Ben Stokes Has Clocked These Numbers in Test Cricket
- Asianet Newsable – Ben Stokes’ International Retirement: Top 6 Historic Achievements
- India TV News – Ben Stokes Retires: 5 Huge Milestones of England Icon
- Business Standard – England Test Skipper Ben Stokes Announces Retirement
