Ryan Campbell<\/a>, the club’s head coach, said that Stokes was unlikely to play before their fifth game, against Worcestershire starting on May 8.<\/p>\n“[The incident] could have been horrific,” Campbell said at Durham’s pre-season media day. “So, so much worse than what you think. A couple of centimetres a different way it hits him in the eye and it could have been different.<\/p>\n
“The ball was hit so hard. We are just lucky he got away with it.”<\/p>\n
Stokes has not played competitively since sustaining a groin injury during the fifth Ashes Test in January. He may now only have two fixtures for Durham – against Worcestershire and Kent in May – before England return to action with a three-Test series against New Zealand starting on June 4.<\/p>\n
“He has been training so hard to be ready,” Campbell said. “He has a lot to prove. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know the Ashes didn’t go so well and he is a proud man who wants England to be the best team in the world.<\/p>\n
“He, as a professional, is working at getting right and ready to go.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Stokes was struck in the face by a Durham academy player while helping in the nets in early…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":501045,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[132648,1721,36623,49,50,132647,101,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-501044","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cricket","8":"tag-bulletin","9":"tag-cricket","10":"tag-daily","11":"tag-headlines","12":"tag-news","13":"tag-package","14":"tag-sports","15":"tag-uk","16":"tag-united-kingdom","17":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/501044","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=501044"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/501044\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/501045"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=501044"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=501044"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=501044"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}