Winter MVP review: More Stokes success

Ben Stokes won the PCA’s England Overall Most Valuable Player award for 2019/20 after his side’s winter schedule was abruptly cut short by the postponement of March’s tour to Sri Lanka due to the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic.

Despite the circumstances, it means further success on an individual level for Stokes after an outstanding 2019, with England’s talisman also claiming the Test MVP award for his match-winning performances on tours of New Zealand and South Africa.

He joins teammates Eoin Morgan and Joe Denly in winning PCA awards this winter, after the duo were named T20I MVP and ODI MVP in consecutive weeks in February.

Stokes, who capped off 2019 by winning both the NatWest PCA Players’ Player of the Year and BBC Sports Personality of the Year awards, continues to set down the marker for his fellow professionals to follow by combining his unique talent with an outstanding attitude and desire to succeed.

He has managed to win the Overall MVP despite being rested for the entirety of England’s five-match T20I series in New Zealand and three ODIs in South Africa.

No-one in the final top five came close to matching his average of 20.15 MVP points-per-game across the season, with only Dom Bess and Jimmy Anderson, who appeared in two Test Matches each, surpassing that tally with 27 and 23 points-per-game each.

Arguably, the individual highlight of Stokes’ winter came on 7 January when he produced a scintillating fifth day spell to take the final three South African wickets and secure an historic English Test win in Cape Town, having already blasted 72 from just 42 balls in his side’s second innings. He was duly named the PCA MVP of the Match with 40.76 MVP points.

Stokes won the same award on 16 February in what proved to be England’s final fixture of the winter, when he took 2-35 and smashed 22 off 12 balls to help his side chase an almost unthinkable 223 to wrap up the T20I series 2-1 against the same opposition.

The PCA MVP algorithm was designed by the players to recognise the particular importance of all-rounders, as well as match-winning performances such as the ones Stokes has consistently produced.

On top of traditional averages, the formula takes into account factors such as scoring quickly, claiming top-order wickets and taking catches in the field.

According to the metric, England’s top performers across all formats over the winter have been Stokes (181 MVP points), followed by Test skipper Joe Root (145), Sam Curran (127), Stuart Broad (101) and the aforementioned Denly (99).

In the Test arena specifically, Stokes makes it an impressive double with 144 MVP points, and he is once again followed by Root (130), Broad (101), Curran (98) and Mark Wood (73) in fifth position.

View the England MVP Rankings here.

Keep up-to-date with all the latest MVP news by following the @pcaMVP on Twitter.