LONDON: England captain Ben Stokes, who leads his side in one-off Test against Zimbabwe on Thursday, has challenged his players to make the jump from second in the Test world rankings to first.
It is now more than a decade since Andrew Strauss was the last England skipper to take the team to the summit, back in 2011. England held the number one spot for under a year and have struggled to challenge since.
When all-rounder Stokes succeeded close friend Joe Root as Test captain in 2022, England had declined to sixth place. However, they have won 22 of their 35 matches since then and a recent annual update of the International Cricket Council’s table propelled Stokes’ side from fifth in the rankings to second, with only arch-rivals Australia above them.
Stokes, speaking at a pre-match press conference at Trent Bridge on Wednesday, said he had made his goal clear in a message to England coach Brendon McCullum and managing director Rob Key.
“When the rankings came out, I did send Baz and Rob Key a text saying, ‘We’ve got one more place to go’,” said Stokes. “Everyone knows when things are going well for us as a team we are incredibly hard to stop. We know it doesn’t always go that way.
“The word ‘ruthless’, I’m not a big fan of,” he said. “The words I do love and what I’ve tried to instil in this team are ‘dominance’ and ‘dominate’. Whatever situation we find ourselves in the game, those are the words I want to be at the front of our heads.”
With the Zimbabwe Test at Nottingham’s Trent Bridge followed by a five-match home series with India and an Ashes campaign in Australia, further victories could lift England back to the top of the table.
“We have Zimbabwe now and that’s our sole focus at the moment,” Stokes insisted. “We know what we have coming up, but we will deal with the challenge of Zimbabwe. Then as we get closer to India starting, we’ll turn our focus to that.”
England finished a modest fifth in the most recent World Test Championship table, an uneven structure that tries to cope with the fact that teams don’t play the same number of matches by using win percentages and one that imposes heavy penalties on slow over-rates.
Stokes has repeatedly criticised the present set-up, which sees title-holders Australia playing South Africa in next month’s final at Lord’s, and said England’s rise up the rankings proved his point.
“I did make some comments around the World Test Championship and they might make a little bit more sense now, considering we’ve jumped up to second,” he said.
This week’s match against Zimbabwe represents Stokes’ first competitive cricket since December, when he tore his hamstring in Hamilton.
It was a recurrence of a similar injury sustained last year, which led to a second successive bout of surgery and rehabilitation.
He intends to return as a fully-functioning all-rounder, though he may not be required to bowl that many overs against a Zimbabwe side playing their first Test against England in 22 years.
“I’ve obviously been training a lot over the last two months and got myself back as close as I possibly can to match intensity,” said Stokes. “But this will be my first game in a while. There is a bit of a gap between how far I can push myself in training and a game.”
Zimbabwe captain Craig Ervine, meanwhile, wants his side to focus on the task at hand rather than the sense of occasion when they face England in a Test for the first time in over 20 years.
“As a group it’s an honour and a privilege to get the opportunity,” Ervine told a pre-match press conference on Wednesday. “Some of us have been playing a long time and have never had the chance to come and play England.
“The group is really excited and everyone is taking it in. It’s probably not going to sink in until quite a while after the Test so we’re just trying to enjoy every moment of it. But a lot of the chat has been about trying to stay focused on the basics, not worrying too much about the outside noise, the crowd, the occasion.”
Published in Dawn, May 22nd, 2025