The fire was burning deep inside Ben Stokes as he took a long and lonely walk to the England team coach after the most crushing experience of what looks destined to be a sparkling career.
The man with potential to become one of the great all-rounders held his head high and had a look of utter defiance on his face as he joined team-mates coming to terms with the scale of their World Twenty20 final defeat.
It was a revealing moment because a lesser character could have been destroyed by what happened in the closing moments of a breathtaking Eden Gardens final that England appeared to have in the bag when West Indies needed 19 runs off the final over.
Nobody could have expected the unheralded figure of Carlos Brathwaite — least of all Stokes himself — to smash four successive sixes off the man Eoin Morgan had trusted to bring the cup home for England.
Yes, Stokes got his lines horribly wrong but it still took something remarkable from West Indies’ No 8 batsman to stop the man described as the ‘heart and soul’ of this England team becoming their death-bowling hero.
Stokes will not be destroyed. Nobody close to the England team has any doubts about that. They are convinced he will come back stronger for the humiliation inflicted by Brathwaite and old nemesis Marlon Samuels.
The adopted Cumbrian of New Zealand stock is made of tough stuff, there is no question about that. He will already be desperate to get back on the field to put right the last four balls of a final that went so badly wrong.
Stokes’s rugby league-playing father Ged once insisted on having a finger amputated after it had been badly dislocated, rather than miss a large chunk of a season and the earnings that were dependent on his participation. Ged’s son might not go that far but he is a chip off the old block.
‘This will only drive Ben on,’ said a source close to the England dressing room. ‘He will be fine. Joe Root kept a particularly close eye on him after the game because they are such good mates, but everyone stuck together.’
Stokes has known adversity before on his rise to become one of the most exciting talents in the game, from an early brush with the law to the indignity of being sent home from a Lions tour in drink-related disgrace and self-inflicted injury.
He missed the last World Twenty20 after fracturing a wrist punching a dressing-room locker in frustration and was controversially left out of the 50-over World Cup last year that became such a watershed for England’s white-ball cricket. Now comes the biggest blow yet for the 24-year-old but, even though Samuels goaded him in Kolkata by saying ‘he never learns’, Stokes has actually learned from every setback he has suffered so far — and will do so again now.
‘He’s one of those blokes who, if we had a game tomorrow, would put his hand up to bowl the last over again,’ said England coach Trevor Bayliss.
‘No-one is blaming Stokesy for anything. He is the heart and soul of this team. If everyone put in half as much effort as Stokesy, we’d go a long way.’
But should Stokes have sledged his great rival Samuels — the man who saluted his dismissal in last year’s Grenada Test — in the heat of the Kolkata battle, because the Jamaican certainly had the final word when he taunted his rival after the third of Brathwaite’s four giant sixes.
‘That’s what turns Stokesy on, that’s what gets his juices flowing and makes him as good as he is,’ insisted Bayliss.
‘He’s not the only one around the world. There are a number of other players who do the same thing. They almost create their own controversy to psych themselves up, to get their head in the game.
‘The more of those type of cricketers we can produce, the better for England.’
Rewind three months to a much happier experience for more evidence that Stokes can cope with Kipling’s twin imposters of triumph and disaster. For the very best times can be just as damaging as the bad ones if they affect a player’s focus.
The Cape Town Test saw the Durham man smash an extraordinary double century, the fastest 250 in history, to announce himself as the best English all-rounder since Sir Ian Botham. He was quickly smothered in superlatives.
Yet as soon as the match had finished, Stokes could be found by the pool of England’s hotel being kept busy by his young son Layton, a bundle of toddler energy who ensured his dad would not get carried away by his success.
The fact that Stokes has two children at such a young age will help him keep Sunday’s ‘disaster’ in perspective now as he surrounds himself with family, counting the days to the first Test against Sri Lanka next month and his shot at redemption.
There have been plenty of examples in history of the very best sportsmen using the lowest of lows to inspire them to their greatest heights.
Think of the looks on the faces of Sebastian Coe when he turned 800 metres defeat by Steve Ovett into 1500m gold at the 1980 Moscow Olympics, and Stuart Pearce when he finally put to bed his penalty miss in the 1990 World Cup semi-final with a shootout strike against Spain at Euro 96.
Stokes had a look in his eyes in Kolkata on Sunday night which Coe and Pearce might recognise.
It is one Samuels, so graceless in celebration at Eden Gardens, may well see when next he crosses swords with his big rival.
Keep your head up, Ben Stokes. The good times will be all the sweeter for what happened to you and England on Sunday night. – Daily Mail