Rob Key, managing director of the England men’s cricket team, has said Ben Stokes could be England’s next ODI captain. Key and head coach, Brendon McCullum, face a pivotal decision over how best to replace Jos Buttler as white-ball captain, who stepped down following England’s Champions Trophy exit in the group stage.
“Ben Stokes is one of the best captains I’ve ever seen so it would be stupid not to look at him. It’s just the knock-on effect of what that means,” Key told reporters at Lord’s on Thursday.
“Nothing’s off the table really. You look at every single option and you think: ‘Right, what is the best thing to do?’
“He’s an unbelievably good tactician, which we’ve seen in Test cricket, and he’s a leader of men. He’s someone who gets the best out of people. He’s someone that, when the pressure is really on, he’s able to throw a blanket around the players and actually say, ‘no, no, this is the way forward, keep going with it’. And I think they’re the things that you need in leadership.
“It’s more about, what would it then mean to him? What would that then mean to his workload? We don’t want to risk other things as well. But there’s always a way in England to start looking at what if it goes wrong? You’ve also got to think, what if it goes right?”
Ben Stokes retired from ODIs before returning for last year’s ODI World Cup and last played a T20 in England’s victorious World Cup final in November 2022.
Last year England’s Test captain Ben Stokes had said he would be willing to return to the white-ball setup under new coach Brendon McCullum if he was asked but added that there had been no conversations about him coming back into the limited-overs squads.
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“I’ve played a lot of white-ball cricket for England and I’m very happy and content with what I’ve achieved in that form of the game …,” Stokes had told Sky Sports in September last year.
“If I get the call to come and play, then obviously it’s definitely going to be a yes. But I’m not going to be too disappointed if I don’t – it means that I can just sit back and watch everyone else go out and smack it.
“Me and Baz (McCullum) have not spoken about anything like that whatsoever.”
