Former England bowler and BBC chief cricket commentator Jonathan Agnew: “Frankly, I can’t see England winning the Ashes without Ben Stokes. <\/p>\n
“He’s a talismanic figure, a resourceful leader, but more than anything, his bowling is important. He’s critical in that department. All of the bowlers, including him, do have fitness concerns. <\/p>\n
“Stokes has to play four out of the five Tests for England to win.<\/p>\n
“For Australia, Travis Head will be an interesting character to watch. I think England are going to bombard him and bowl with great hostility at him. And he hasn’t had a great start to the Australian season. <\/p>\n
“Obviously, Steve Smith is crucial to their batting, but I think Head is too. There’s a lot of uncertainty about how Australia are going to bat and he can change the game in the course of an hour. <\/p>\n
“England will have some serious plans for Head – he’ll need to go and buy some extra padding, and he doesn’t play the short ball well. But if he does get away with it and does find a way of adapting to that attack, then I think he is potentially the most dangerous batsman in the Australian side.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Former England bowler and BBC chief cricket commentator Jonathan Agnew: “Frankly, I can’t see England winning the Ashes…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":266669,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[1721,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-266668","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cricket","tag-cricket","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266668","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=266668"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266668\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/266669"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=266668"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=266668"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=266668"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}