Forster’s remote camera was able to catch Stokes’s bat at the peak of its flight, top left - Stu Forster/Getty Images
Ben Stokes, a Flying Bat, and a Sporting Snapshot for the Ages
Stu Forster’s remote camera captured the essence of drama and comedy as the captain lost his grip on the bat – and England lost their grip on the match – in Multan.
The shot of the tour? Not to Joe Root or Harry Brook the accolade, but surely to Stu Forster, Getty Images’ fine photographer. During the second Test against Pakistan in Multan, Forster captured a wonderful photograph of Ben Stokes after the England captain had charged down the pitch, lost his grip on the bat and was stumped, yards from his ground, his bat flying — as if into orbit — and framed perfectly in the left-hand corner of the image.
The photograph catches the essence of the drama and the comedy: Stokes, a warrior without a weapon, is on his knees, one hand on the ground to balance, and peering over his left shoulder to where his bat is flying; Salman Ali Agha, at slip, is also following the bat’s trajectory; Mohammad Rizwan has completed the stumping and Brydon Carse, the non-striker, Noman Ali, the bowler, and Abdullah Shafique, at short leg, have eyes only for that.
At first glance, I had missed the bat in the corner. Thankfully, Forster didn’t. As usual with a classic sporting image, it came down to being there, to experience, good judgment, good equipment, and a little luck. The “classic” is my non-expert judgment by the way, not Forster’s, who is known to a generation of England cricketers as a down-to-earth, humble grafter. There’s a twinkle in his eye and a nod, though, when I ask him if he’s pleased with it.
Forster has been around for a long time. His first assignment in cricket was Durham’s first match as a professional club in 1992 (a game I played in, coincidentally) and he has been a regular on England tours since the mid-Nineties. He reckoned the conditions to be challenging in Multan (temperatures were in the high 30s) but manageable.
He’s fair-skinned and ginger-haired, so has been wearing long trousers and long short sleeves as protection against the sun, eschewing the more gung-ho attitude of his younger days. He is thankful to the runners on the England team, who often drop water by his side during the hours of play, but reckons Galle and Colombo in 2001 — a tour to Sri Lanka on which I played — to be the hottest and most uncomfortable conditions he’s worked in.
On the final day of the Multan Test , he’d parked himself at wide long-on (for the left-hander), and his remote, fixed camera was high above the bowler’s arm. The remote camera has become an occasional savior for the snappers: it was Gareth Copley’s remote camera that captured the panorama of the controversial Jonny Bairstow stumping in the Ashes at Lord’s, after some sharp thinking from Alex Carey.
Forster’s good fortune (or intuition) was to keep the fixed camera “loose” or on a wider angle than normal. “Normally,” he says, “I wouldn’t have as much of the background in, but I kept the shot wide because the Test was coming to an end, and you don’t know where the winning moment or catch might come, so I wanted as much of the field in the shot as possible.”
As a result, he was able to capture the bat at the furthest point of its parabola. Phil Brown, another excellent photographer on the cricket scene, was the only other snapper on the ground with a separate fixed camera, but he had focused in more tightly. As a result, Brown got the shot and the stumping, but with the bat much earlier in its flight. By the time the bat reached its zenith, it was out of shot for him. At this point, fortunately for Forster, the bat also turned on its axis, so that it was facing the camera, rather than side-on and less visible.
It was a confusing moment in the match for everyone, not least Forster who was trying to work out what had happened. “I didn’t realise how far the bat had gone at first, because through my camera at ground level I’m focusing in tightly on Stokes,” he says. “It all happened in such a rush, all I was worried about was whether I’d missed anything.”
The remote camera works in sync with the camera Forster was using. “I thought I’d try to make sense of it afterward, so luckily I kept firing. I wasn’t really thinking about what was on the remote at this stage, and it was only when Matt Roller [a journalist at the website ESPN Cricinfo] said to me later that the moment must have looked good on the remote that I checked.”
It was here in Pakistan that one of the most celebrated cricket photographs of all was taken, when Graham Morris captured the row between Mike Gatting and the umpire Shakoor Rana in 1987. With the light closing in, other photographers had packed up for the day, which meant that Morris got the image to himself — a rare event then, even rarer now, given advances in technology, restrictions in where photographers can sit in certain venues, and the ease of travel to far-flung destinations.
“It’s rare these days to get something that no one else has got,” Forster says. “Take Gareth’s [Copley’s] great shot of the Stokes winning moment in the Ashes at Headingly in 2019, at least six other snappers would have had similar versions. At the football Euros, for example, we were all crammed into a small area, and the technology is so good these days it’s hard to get something in play that others don’t.”
It was no surprise, too, that Forster’s cracking image involved Stokes. Some cricketers are just more energetic and photogenic and provide better copy, and Stokes is one of those. Patrick Eagar, the great cricket photographer, once said that it was impossible to take a bad photograph of Ian Botham on the field. Forster names Darren Gough and Andrew Flintoff in that category, too.
And Stokes, of course. In Multan, in a dramatic moment captured for posterity, Stokes tried to hit the ball with such venom that the bat flew out of his hands so far as to be almost out of shot. Thankfully for Forster — and for us — not quite out of shot. - The Times
