Barney Ronay reminds us that Ben Stokes is not 'the next Freddie Flintoff':
In February Paul Collingwood likened not batting Stokes in the top six in his early England career to playing Cristiano Ronaldo at right-back.
And this summer, as his Test batting average has climbed from 28 to 39, Stokes has in a sense become the player he always was in the first place, the high-class middle-order batsman obscured at times by his ability to bowl slightly callow spells of genuine fast bowling.
Aged 19, Stokes was batting No4 for Durham, becoming in the process the only Englishman besides Denis Compton to score five first-class hundreds before the age of 20. He was, is and remains a batsman, and a seriously good one too.
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