Watch- Sensational fielding! Ben Stokes flies off the boundary line, saves important runs for the team

Cricket as a game has come leaps and bounds from the days when players rarely dived to stop runs. As the game, however, becomes shorter and more competitive, every single run becomes much more important.

Today’s teams lay immense importance on fielding and saving as many runs as possible. With the advent of 20-20 cricket, players diving on the boundary line to save runs has become a normal occurrence. One such fielding performance was seen in the ongoing Australia vs England match when the England all-rounder made a sensational save on the boundary line and essentially saved four runs.

Stokes came up with the fielding masterclass on the first ball of the 12^th over when Mitchell Marsh hit an overpitched delivery on long off. As the ball was sailing over the boundary line a flying Ben Stokes intercepted the ball and threw it back inside the ground. In the process of saving the six, Stokes himself falls outside of the boundary line.

The video has since then been getting a lot of traction on social media with fans claiming it to be one of the best fielding moments in recent times.

Watch the spectacular fielding effort here: 

Simply outstanding! Ben Stokes saves six with some acrobatics on the rope! #AUSvENG #PlayOfTheDay | #Dettol pic.twitter.com/5vmFRobfif

— cricket.com.au (@cricketcomau) October 12, 2022

As for the match, it brought back-to-back wins for the visiting team and earned them the series. Coming onto bat first, the England team produced 178/7 in 20 overs. While the openers failed to perform, David Malan took charge of batting and played a match-winning knock of 82 in 49 deliveries. Moeen Ali also lent a helping hand and brought out 44 runs in just 27 deliveries to get the England side to a defendable total.

With the series on the line, Australia began the run chase quite poorly as both openers were back into the dugout at just 22 runs. It was Mitchell Marsh who took charge of the chase as he scored 45 off 29, but could not take the team further. Tim David tried to level the series with his 40 off of 23 but the target proved a touch too far for the home team and they lost by eight runs.

The four runs saved by Ben Stokes earlier proved to be very important to the team at the end.