England were staring down a barrel. “We will need to bat for 150 overs to save the game,” Ben Stokes had said bullishly at the end of the third day’s play of the second Test at Lord’s. Fast forward to the following afternoon. England’s top order was in tatters, with four wickets having fallen and with just 48 runs scored. Cometh the hour, cometh the etc… Within minutes the home side was five down, with Stokes, the one in-form England batsman, having run himself out for a duck. Dismissals don’t come much more embarrassing than this. There had been an easy run, but Stokes had just ambled along and forgotten to ground his bat.

Even two days later, he isn’t keen to talk about it. “It was a schoolboy error,” he says. “The sort of thing you only do once in your Test career.” For most cricketers that might well be true, but part of the attraction of Stokes is that you can imagine him doing it again only too easily. He is one of those players you can’t take your eyes off. He’s either performing magnificently or screwing up big time. There’s little in between. No one – least of all Stokes himself – has yet learned how to tame his talent.

English fans have always had a soft spot for uncompromising “play hard, drink hard” bad-boy all-rounders – think Ian Botham and Freddie Flintoff – and Stokes fits the mould. When he describes how much he feels he has calmed down since he got married and had children – he is still only 24 – you can only wonder how wild he was before. Although he was born in New Zealand, he has lived most of his life in Britain and looks and sounds like a Durham boy. He insists his best moment in cricket so far was “winning the county championship with a game to spare last season”, but understands few others share that opinion.

For most people, the game in which he came of age was against New Zealand at Lord’s in May. Having come in when England were a rocky 40-4 on the first morning, Stokes scored 92 in a 161-run stand with Joe Root. In the second innings he went one better by scoring England’s second fastest Test century in just 85 balls. To round it off, he took three wickets in New Zealand’s second innings to earn himself the man of the match award.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Late contender: being run out by Mitchell Johnson of Australia during day four of the 2nd Investec Ashes Test match. Photograph: Ryan Pierse/Getty Images

For anyone steeped in the traditions of English cricket, the national team’s performances this summer – of which Stokes has been a poster boy – have been very odd. Previous teams had a safety-first mindset of making sure they didn’t lose a game – or lose it too badly – before thinking about how to win it. But the Test and one-day series against New Zealand, and the first Test against Australia at Cardiff, were very different. Time and again England kept going and going at the opposition. From the opening pair right down to the number 11, no one took a backward step. These were the kind of tactics that were meant to have died out with the Charge of the Light Brigade. This was a young team with attitude.

The night before the first day of the series will be the worst. I’ll probably have to drink eight pints to get to sleep Ben Stokes

Normal service was resumed at Lord’s when England were thrashed inside four days. But Stokes was one of the few England players to come away with his reputation enhanced. After a quickfire 50 and 40 in the first Test, he briefly threatened to take the game back to Australia with an entertaining innings of 87. Even his second-innings duck had its comic charm. If any redemption is to be found in the final three Tests, then Stokes is likely to be the man.

Part of Stokes’s appeal is that what you see is what you get. Even on a sponsor’s day at Investec’s banking HQ in the city of London just before the beginning of the first Ashes Test in Cardiff – a few hours, at least, when he is meant to be resolutely on message – he is his own man. He doesn’t pretend there aren’t things he would rather be doing than being interviewed, but neither does he trot out the usual corporate banalities associated with professional sportsmen and women. Ask him a direct question and you get a surprisingly direct answer.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest English fans have always had a soft spot for bad-boy all-rounders, and Stokes fits the mould. Photograph: Philip Brown/Reuters

Have you had team meetings to discuss how you will bowl at the Australians? “We have,” he smiles, “but I can’t concentrate for more than 10 minutes. I think I must have dozed off. The captain will have to remind me on the day.” Was the team bonding trip to Spain fun? “Yeah, apart from the afternoon me and Belly got landed playing golf against Trevor. He’s useless.” That’s Ian Bell and Trevor as in Trevor Bayliss, the newly appointed coach of the England cricket side – most cricketers with an eye to their prospects might have kept Bayliss’s uselessness at golf to themselves. How will you relax through the Ashes series? “The night before the first day of the series will be the worst. I’ll probably have to drink eight pints to get to sleep.”

And so on. The off-field counter-narrative extends on to the pitch itself. It’s become a quickly accepted wisdom that one of the main reasons the recent Test and one-day series against New Zealand produced such thrilling cricket was because both teams got on well with each other. Stokes gives a more nuanced assessment. “There has always been sledging in cricket,” he says. “I don’t know why people are suddenly making such a big deal of it. The New Zealand tour wasn’t about there being good or bad blood between the teams. There was no team decision not to say anything. In the first Test, I said a few things to some of their players to see if I could stir things up. But I couldn’t. Once I realised that, I didn’t bother any more. Sledging or not sledging are just different versions of being in the fight. You do what you have to do to get an advantage.”

In the Caribbean earlier this year Stokes made the wrong kind of back-page headlines when he responded angrily to an ironic salute from the West Indian player Marlon Samuels. “I knew what was coming as soon as I got out,” he says. “I’d played against Samuels on a Lions tour in 2011 and I didn’t like him then either. He did what he did and I said what I said. End of. We went on to win a match we should never have won, so I reckon I still came out ahead.”

There has always been sledging in cricket. I don’t know why people are suddenly making such a big deal of it Ben Stokes

“Fight” is a word that Stokes often uses in conversation. Cricket is a fight. His contests between bowlers and batsmen are duels. There is little sense of detachment; everything is personal and in the moment. At times the fight gets rather too physical. After a first ball duck – “Thanks for reminding me” – against the West Indies in a T20 match in 2014, Stokes took out his anger on his dressing-room locker. The locker won and Stokes broke his wrist. “I tried to pretend everything would be OK,” he laughs, “because I felt such a dick. So I went out to field as normal. After one return from the boundary that my two-year-old daughter could have thrown further, the captain sent me off the field.”

That wasn’t the first time Stokes’s competitiveness tipped towards self-destruction. In 2011 he was arrested and cautioned for obstructing the police. Barely a year later, in February 2013, he got himself sent home from a Lions tour of Australia for ignoring warnings about his drinking. At least that’s how it was reported. “I’d happily tell you the real reason,” he shrugs, “but I don’t think I’m allowed to. A lot of things got said and written that weren’t accurate.”

Stokes says this with such artlessness it feels as if it is probably true. After all, it’s not as if he has bothered to lie about anything else. What he will confirm was that he got caught doing the wrong thing at the wrong time – he chose the week Andy Flower, the England first-team director, was in town for his disciplinary hearing – and he has no complaints at his treatment.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘He did what he did and I said what I said. End of…’: Stokes receives a salute from Marlon Samuels in Grenada. Photograph: Ricardo Mazalan/AP

The most telling part of this episode was his response. Did he think he might have screwed up his career for good through not being able to toe the party line? “Not for a moment,” he says. Really? It’s not as if his performances were setting the cricket world on fire at the time. “Not for a moment,” he repeats. “I told the management I was sorry, that it wouldn’t happen again and I would go away and work hard to get back in the team.”

It’s this strong sense of mission, as much as his talent, that makes Stokes such an attractive and tough cricketer. There was another promising player, Matt Coles, who was sent home from the Lions tour at the same time – he has been barely mentioned in England dispatches since.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ben Stokes. Photograph: Richard Saker for the Observer

Very little has come to Stokes easily. He was uprooted from his native New Zealand at the age of 11 when his parents moved to England; at 15 he went to play in Durham while the rest of his family remained down south, and three years ago his parents decamped back to New Zealand. It’s fair to say he has had to make his own way and his own luck in life. It’s also fair to say he probably wouldn’t have reacted that well to more hands-on direction.

After several years of lowish scores and OK bowling performances, he has been given more responsibility by being asked to bat higher up the order. Not that he takes anything for granted: he’s usually the first out on to the training ground and he’s self-aware enough to know that good days and bad days generally even themselves out. “I got a lot of credit for the six wickets I took in an innings in Sydney on the last Ashes tour,” he says. “But I felt it was the worst I bowled all winter. I just got lucky by taking wickets with bad balls.”

That’s another thing he has come to realise. Performances in Ashes Tests tend to get remembered rather longer than those where there is less at stake, and Stokes is keen to leave the right sort of memories. So far, so good, though Stokes is on noticeably less bullish form when we speak on the phone on the day following the Lord’s Test. He sounds tired and reverts to the default management-speak of the bland professional sportsman.

“We outplayed them in the first Test, they outplayed us in the second,” he says. “That’s all there is to it. At Lord’s we just didn’t perform well enough with ball or ball. No excuses.”

The conversation peters out as his baby starts crying in the background and Stokes is clearly itching to get off the phone and comfort her. For the time being she has her dad all to herself. Come Wednesday, when the third Test starts at Edgbaston, England cricket fans will be looking to Stokes to provide them with just as much consolation.

Investec are title sponsor of the Ashes (investec.co.uk)