Ben Stokes says facial injury scare could have been much worse

Ben Stokes said he "got out quite lucky" after a ball struck him in the face during a Durham nets session, leaving him with a broken right cheekbone, other facial injuries and major surgery that pushed his comeback back by about a month.

The England captain was coaching Durham’s academy players in February when an academy batter hit a ball that hit him "straight in the face". Stokes said it was a "pretty scary situation" and that "a couple of inches one way or the other" could have made the outcome far worse. The accident underlined how quickly a routine practice session can turn dangerous, even for one of the game’s most experienced players.

Stokes’s comments sharpen the focus on safety standards in cricket training, especially in net environments where coaches, senior players and academy cricketers work close together. He had already been managing a groin problem picked up at the SCG in January, so the facial injury further disrupted a return that was already under strain. The setback delayed his comeback plans for the start of the domestic season and left him looking at a compressed path back to full match fitness.

He is now targeting two County Championship matches for Durham next month, against Worcestershire on May 8 and Kent on May 15. There is also a chance he could play for England Lions against South Africa A at Arundel on May 22, which would give him a maximum of three first-class matches before England’s Test summer begins.

That summer opens against New Zealand at Lord’s on June 4, a date that now shapes the final stage of Stokes’s recovery and conditioning. England will want him available, but the sequence of fixtures leaves little margin for further interruption after the facial injury and the earlier groin issue.

The episode also arrived with Stokes and Brendon McCullum under scrutiny after England’s 4-1 Ashes defeat in Australia. Even so, the more immediate lesson from Stokes’s injury is not tactical but practical: in cricket’s training spaces, the difference between a scare and a much worse outcome can be measured in inches, and elite-level preparation still depends on how well those risks are managed.