"I can guarantee Ben Stokes would have made a different decision" - Stuart Broad reignites stumping row of Lord's Ashes Test
Retired English cricketer Stuart Broad has continued to criticize Australia over the contentious stumping of Jonny Bairstow during the Lord's Test of the 2023 Ashes series. The former right-arm seamer is of the opinion that England skipper Ben Stokes would have never made that call.
With the second Test at Lord's on a knife's edge, Aussie keeper Alex Carey seized the opportunity to hit the stumps as Bairstow walked out of the crease after ducking a delivery from Cameron Green. After the Englishman was ruled out by the umpires, the visitors copped flak from the crowd, with the Lord's members heckling David Warner and Usman Khawaja.
Speaking to The Sun, Broad reckons Ben Stokes would have never appealed for it and recalled how dismissing David Warner in the first over of the next Test ignited him even more.
"My feelings haven’t changed. I’m slightly more relaxed than I was at Lord’s and I do cringe about going into red-mist mode, but I don’t think it was the right decision and I can guarantee Ben Stokes would have made a different one. But that Bairstow dismissal ignited the series for us. It dragged out the England-Australia rivalry. We hardly lost a session after it. It brought a bit of needle to the next Test at Leeds. I dismissed David Warner in the first over and emotion got the better of me — I ran at the crowd, yelling, ‘Come on!’"
After losing the Lord's Test by 43 runs and going 0-2 down, the hosts bounced back with a powerful performance in Leeds. They were unfortunate as the Manchester Test resulted in a draw, but emerged victorious at The Oval to finish the series level at 2-2.
"There was blood everywhere" - Stuart Broad recalls grueling Ashes series
Broad also recalled conversing with James Anderson on WhatsApp and explained how wounded his feet were after playing six back-to-back Tests. He added:
"A few weeks later Jimmy sent this WhatsApp message, he’d been videoing me. I took my boots off, there was blood everywhere, and I chucked them in the bin — that was me signalling, ‘OK, I’m done’. I didn’t even remember I’d done that. I was knackered, I’d played six Tests back-to-back, my emotions had been sky high and so low, and when I saw that video it was as if there was this big light shining out like in the movies."
With 604 wickets, the Nottinghamshire seamer finished as England's second-highest wicket-taker in Tests.