"I have been thinking an awful lot about this image here. There is something truly remarkable when you watch someone who is a famous leader, who is larger than life, who sucks up all the oxygen, who everything is about them. Even though you know one day they will die, they will be voted out, they will retire, whatever it may be. When it actually happens, there's a sense of shock, right? Now, of course, I'm not saying that Ben Stokes is like Saddam Hussein, but we've all seen something like this happen in our life before and we've been like, oh my God, this has actually happened. And so when Ben Stokes retired the other day, most of us already had an inkling. I'd already written a piece that could have been used as a retirement piece if it needed to be. And there was no doubt there was more than enough scuttlebutt and innuendo and whatever you wanted out there to say that something was wrong and Ben Stokes might go. But there's a difference between that and actually bringing the giant man down. And that is really what has happened here. The entire structure piece by piece has gone down. Almost everything in English cricket, one way or another, is kind of built around personality, the cricket, the captaincy, the leadership, the ethos of Ben Stokes. And suddenly all of that has just come falling down piece by piece. And what English cricket is left with is a gaping hole."