Having spent last winter touring with England's Test squad, Olly Stone was ruled out of the home Test summer with a knee injury. Now, he's ready to fight for a place in England's Ashes squad.
Olly Stone is no stranger to pain. His career has been littered with injuries which have required significant time out of the game, the latest of which required him to undergo his fifth surgery at the start of this year. The rehab on his knee ruled him out of the first part of the Test summer and, having spent a full winter touring with England and with a significant number of other quicks also out injured, it couldn’t have come at a worse time.
“There’s never a good time to pick up an injury, but the start of the English summer was frustrating,” Stone tells Wisden.com. “It was one of those where you look back and think, if I’d have known I needed it done I could have had it done sooner. But unfortunately I didn’t know. It’s part and parcel of the job unfortunately.”
The surgeries Stone has undergone to keep his body on the park and his speeds up have ranged from his finger to his ACL, and include having pins inserted into the vertebrae of his lower back after suffering a third stress fracture four years ago. All of those enforced breaks have interrupted a promising international career, which so far has consisted of 16 England caps.
The first of those in the Test format came six years ago at Lord’s, where he impressed as England began to widen their pool of out-and-out quicks. A potential Test debut had already been delayed, with Stone having flown home from that winter’s tour of the West Indies after being diagnosed with a stress fracture in his back. Recurrences of that injury led to an 18-month gap before Stone was seen in Test whites again, replacing an injured Jofra Archer in India in 2021.
Olly Stone will miss the India Test series but is working towards full fitness by August 2025.#Cricket #ENGvsIND pic.twitter.com/4Tgxb4M0js
— Wisden (@WisdenCricket) April 4, 2025
Having taken a wicket in the first over of his Test comeback and reached speeds of 93mph, the course was set for Stone to boost England’s pace ranks in the Ashes later that year. Once again, injury intervened.
“Unfortunately, when you bowl quick, I feel like the injuries that happen are more severe,” Stone says. “You sort of know that at some point you might pick up something, even if you do all the work away from cricket to make those injuries minor blips not major ones.”
After two years of “major” blips frustrating his Test career, everything seemed to fall into place at the back end of last summer. Having built up his workload over the season – doubling the number of first-class matches he’d played over the previous three years – he was selected for the second Test series of the summer against Sri Lanka. Once again, an Ashes series loomed around the corner, and once again England were looking to expand their pool of big men bowling fast.
“It was a nice phone call to get when I received it,” says Stone of seeing Brendon McCullum’s number pop up on his phone. “When you’re out of it, you think ‘is that my last game?’ And thankfully I was fortunate enough to play two games last summer and loved it. Not that I needed it, but it gives you that hunger for more.
“Unfortunately, the start of this season didn’t get off to the way I wanted it with my knee injury, but I’m back now, and hopefully I’ll have a big next two months to see whether I can put my name in the hat for an Ashes call-up. I thought maybe that chance would never come again.”
Stone spent last winter touring with England, including a mad dash home from Pakistan to get married. Scheduling his wedding in the middle of a Test series was an indication of his own feelings on where his immediate international future lay a year before. “At the time, I wasn’t involved,” says Stone. “So I thought October was a safe month for us cricketers – I think you’ll find a lot of our anniversaries are in October. We planned it, and then the Test tour to Pakistan came… It was very surreal. Back in England for five days to get married, and then back to work, as I call it. It was a bizarre time, but I wouldn’t have changed it for the world.”
Despite not featuring in Pakistan, and also touring New Zealand without making a playing XI later in the winter, it’s not out of the question that Stone could be on the plane to Australia in a few months’ time. However, it’s clear he has slipped down the pecking order since his last Test appearance. Four of England’s Ashes squad places will almost certainly be taken up by Gus Atkinson, Jofra Archer, Mark Wood and Brydon Carse, with Josh Tongue also a likely pick.
Given the high workloads and physicality of a five Test series in Australia, and the depletion of their frontline attack through injuries by the end of this summer’s series against India, it feels likely that England could take a wider group of pace bowlers than they previously have on Ashes tours. That leaves Stone contending with the likes of Matthew Potts, Sam Cook and Jamie Overton for a sixth spot. There’s also a concurrent England Lions tour scheduled which, even if Stone doesn’t make the main touring party, you’d fancy he’ll be involved in.
“The fact is, people selected in this [Anderson-Tendulkar] series are ahead of me,” says Stone. “I might not be first on the team sheet, but I’ve not given up. You see in sport how a couple of incidents can happen and suddenly you’re back in the mix. I’m realistic that I’m not involved at the moment, I might not be the first on the team sheet but I try not to let that worry me. I just go out and perform. If they feel I deserve a seat on that plane, my phone will ring. If not, I’ll keep playing and enjoying cricket.”
Perhaps against Stone in the Ashes race is that he missed out on selection for Nottinghamshire in their last Championship game before the break for The Hundred, despite being “fit and raring to go”. He also wasn’t selected for London Spirit’s first two games, but impressed when he did come in against Manchester Originals this week, dismissing both Phil Salt and Heinrich Klaasen. That spell came before Sonny Baker, an up-and-coming quick with an ECB development contract, bowled an electrifying spell of pace to David Warner later in the game.
Nevertheless, in terms of the injury-plagued narrative of Stone’s career, being selected for the biggest Ashes series in a generation would bring an element of closure to all of the agonizing near misses of the past.
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