Stokes was never a man of averages. He belonged to moments, and moments have an inconvenient habit of resisting arithmetic. The 258 at Cape Town, the fastest Test 250 ever scored, tells you more about him than any spreadsheet could. The mean is for actuaries. Stokes dealt in extremes, in tamasha, in the improbable stories grandparents tell children who politely pretend they have never heard them before.
