Ben Stokes’ Documentary To Serve As Wake Up Call For Fans’ Expectations?

Ben Stokes Documentary: If there is one name that is consistently making a buzz for the past few months, it is Ben Stokes. For good reasons or shocking ones, Ben has been around after his comeback to international cricket, him taking charge over as the England Test Team Captain or taking retirement from One Day Internationals that further sparked debate about the format’s demise.

After all this, there always arises a question about what happened before the sabbatical. Stokes has been quite open about his mental health issues, which is a big taboo in the sports industry. The players who are seen as celebrities are hardly given the room to feel bad or act human because of their grand idealistic behavioral expectations from them. To answer all questions and to learn about what goes into a player’s life apart from the field, and how they cope with expectations from the world and themselves we have Ben Stokes Documentary called ‘Ben Stokes: The Phoenix From The Ashes’ coming up that will be premiered on Friday.

Talking about the same, Stokes opened up about what the documentary is about and what we can expect from it.

He said, “When I decided that it is something that I need to do in terms of making a documentary, I specifically said I don’t want this to be a documentary where it is all about making myself look good. This is an opportunity for me to show people who actually I am because I think very rarely that sportsmen are able to do that.

“Sportsmen are painted a picture by what people see them on TV by playing or in media or in conferences and stuff like that. It is very rare that you see them in their own space and in their own comfortable environment. But I felt the responsibility and was clear that everything is going to be there. Not just to maybe look good, because I have had so many things in my career, not just in cricket but also from my personal life.”

“Why I felt like sharing with people is because if I didn’t do that, people would be like ‘Why hasn’t he spoken about that?’ Such a public thing, from the T20 World Cup to Bristol to the break I took for mental health. If I didn’t cover that, I wouldn’t have been doing any justice. I just wanted to make sure that everything was covered in the documentary as much as it could be.”

Stokes continued by describing how the phrase ‘Phoenix from the Ashes’ which means to come out of a disaster smarter and stronger, had a special meaning for him and captures the essence of his life, making it a fitting choice for the title of his documentary.

“I guess the reason behind it is like throughout my personal and cricket life, it’s sort of like how you can come back from those kinds of things. Not letting certain moments define you and as you go forward, it can help you define where you are in the future if that makes sense. When you come down, how you are going to get back out of it and how you get yourself out of the problem that you are in.”

After experiencing setbacks in the form of the 2016 T20 World Cup final and negativity surrounding the fight outside a nightclub in Bristol in 2017, where he was ultimately cleared of affray charges, which has been given a significant share in the documentary, Stokes rose like a phoenix from the Ashes moment when he led England to winning the 2019 Cricket World Cup final at home.

To conclude Stokes said, “One thing that I have learnt is that as good as great moments are successes, failures are something that you can either learn to stay on top of you or hold you down. Or you let those failures or not-so-good times inspire you to be better or to overcome them.

“I am not a person to let me hold anything down or define me. Failures are just a part of your life. They will come in personal life or professional career, whatever that maybe. But you just got a way to overcome them and not let them define you or hold you down and keep yourself up.”

There is a lot to learn from the personal life of the cricketers who are a lot more than just being players, they are sons, daughters, friends, and partners and have their personal life through which they deal with and work in the professional sports arena.