William James, the father of American psychology, said that the deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.
Appreciated as different from praised or celebrated. Those are different things and both can happen at a distance without much real understanding attached to them. Appreciation is something quieter and more personal. It means being told that what you gave was real, the cost of it understood, and that people were genuinely paying attention while you were giving it.
Cricket, of all sports, should understand this. It asks more of a person than most - years of emotional energy, private disappointment, and the quiet courage required to keep coming back after failure. That is why a farewell in cricket matters as much as it does, and why getting that wrong is a more serious failure than the game tends to admit.
What happened around Ben Stokes at Trent Bridge in June 2026 was a mess, and a sadly dispiriting moment. I don't intend to go over every detail, as most people who care about cricket have already formed their own opinion. What lingers is the feeling his departure left behind. A great modern cricketer, a man who gave English cricket moments it will never forget, played his final innings as a kind of "up yours", if ever I have seen one.
Yes, he received appreciation. But appreciation on its own is not the same as a proper farewell. Appreciation is the feeling; the right farewell is the way the game gives that feeling shape.
Every player has a part in how their career ends. The timing, the manner, the emotional shape of a departure, are deeply personal and nobody can leave with grace if they haven't made peace with the ending themselves. Employer and player cannot act in isolation, because above them both is the game. Stokes's own choices in the weeks before Trent Bridge clearly narrowed the space available to him, but if those responsible for the game view these moments only through the behaviour of the individual, they miss the larger responsibility and opportunity.
Cricket is very good at building pathways in. A young player entering professional cricket is surrounded by structure, but where is the serious, sustained conversation about departure and meaning for the sport that builds some of its biggest moments around them? I am still to hear of cricket treating the farewell as a genuine part of player development.
The right farewell does not happen by accident. It requires thought, long before the final months and weeks arrive, not to manufacture emotion or impose ceremony on someone who wants none of it, but to ensure it is clear in what is said about the game.
Granted, cricket has produced beautiful departures. Guards of honour, standing ovations, opponents who understood the scale of the moment and acted accordingly. But too often these occasions depend on a fortunate alignment of timing and goodwill rather than on any consistent culture that says leaving well is something the game demands of itself regardless of the circumstances. When that alignment is absent, as it was with Stokes, there is no structure to compensate. The moment is simply lost.
Golf has always understood this differently. When Jack Nicklaus crossed the Swilcan Bridge at St Andrews for the last time, the game paused and paid its respects with a gravity proportionate to everything he had given it. Arnold Palmer's farewell at the same bridge moved grown men to tears, and nobody thought it was too much because everyone there understood they were not merely watching a retirement, they were watching the sport say something true and lasting about what it values. Golf treats the exit as part of the story. Cricket still largely treats it as an administrative matter that resolves itself.
My appeal to all stakeholders is: do not wait for injury, conflict, poor form or a broken curfew. Build the conversation early. Make it clear, as part of the culture that surrounds every international career from the beginning, that the game that invited you in will walk you to the door as well, and that doing so with care and dignity is not optional but expected.
A cricket career must have dignity at both ends, not only at the beginning, when everything is full of possibility. Sadly, cricket consistently underestimates this. When a farewell is handled poorly, the opposite impression forms. The game looks careless with its own people and uncertain of how to honour service when the final act arrives.
Stokes was not a neat cricketer, because the greatest sporting lives rarely are. But for me he made us feel cricket, in the way that only a handful of players in any generation manage to do. And precisely because of this, the ending mattered. And this is where William James' thought returns, because it was always where it was heading. A career like Stokes' deserved a farewell that allowed the game to show its appreciation without confusion. One that would have helped us feel the full size of what he had given, rather than leave us sorting through the discomfort of how it all finished. It was not about a lack of affection or respect but a failure of timing, shape and care. The difference between those things is not small.
Let us not forget that somewhere a child is watching this, reading and listening. They are watching how cricket treats its people when the applause is beginning to fade. They are watching whether the sport has room for gratitude at the end, or only for selection and performance at the beginning. They are watching whether greatness is honoured only when it is producing something useful, or whether the game has the decency and the self-awareness to say goodbye properly, with gratitude, appreciation and forgiveness, when the time comes.
If cricket gets that moment right, the child does not only witness an ending. They see a reason to love the game for the rest of their life.