Kuldeep dismisses Stokes at York, with one county game left before the Sri Lanka Tests
Kuldeep Yadav had Ben Stokes caught at backward point for 12 and finished with 2 for 23 as Yorkshire beat Durham by seven wickets at Clifton Park. One One-Day Cup match remains before he joins India’s Test squad.
Aug 1, 2026
Ben Stokes went back to reverse sweep, picked out George Hill at backward point, and walked off having made 12 from 39 balls. The bowler was Kuldeep Yadav, a week into a county stint that exists because India did not pick him in England, and Durham were 42 for 4 in the 21st over at Clifton Park.
Durham never recovered from the first 10 overs
Durham won the toss on Friday, chose to bat, and were 15 for 3. Graham Clark went for 1, Alex Lees feathered one behind for 7, and Emilio Gay lost his middle stump to Ben Coad for 1. Stokes walked in with an innings that needed rebuilding rather than acceleration, and he took 39 balls over his 12, with one boundary in it.
Ben Cliff did most of the damage with 4 for 38 from 9.1 overs, his second four-wicket haul in as many Fridays after doing the same to Glamorgan at Neath the week before. Coad was the pick of them on figures alone, 1 for 19 from nine with five maidens in a seven-over new-ball spell. Will Rhodes top-scored with 31 before Dom Bess had him caught and bowled, and Durham were all out for 165 in 48.1 overs.
Kuldeep bowled his full 10 overs for 2 for 23, one of them a maiden. Stokes was the first, Colin Ackermann the second, trapped lbw for 26.
Wharton and Whiteman finish it with nine overs to spare
Yorkshire made a mess of the start. Adam Lyth was lbw for a duck, Will Luxton edged Stokes to Drissell for 4, and the chase was 5 for 2 before it had begun. Will Bennison made 36 to steady it, and when he went, James Wharton and Sam Whiteman put on an unbroken 97 for the fourth wicket and took the game away quietly. Wharton finished 68 not out, Whiteman 52 not out, and Yorkshire got there at 167 for 3 in 41 overs, seven wickets and 54 balls to spare.
It was Yorkshire’s fourth win in a row, four from five in Group B, and 4,859 people at Clifton Park watched it, their biggest One-Day Cup crowd in nine years. Marcus North, England men’s national selector, was among them, which will not have hurt Wharton on a day he batted his side past Stokes.
Five games, then Galle
Kuldeep signed for Yorkshire for five One-Day Cup matches and three County Championship games at Headingley in September. The gap in the middle is India’s two-Test tour of Sri Lanka, and he is in the 15-man squad for it. The first Test starts in Galle on 15 August.
The county deal followed India’s white-ball tour of England, where Kuldeep was in the ODI squad for all three matches and played none of them. India lost the series 2-1, and the decision to go into the Lord’s decider with four seamers and Axar Patel as the only specialist spinner drew public criticism from Ravichandran Ashwin and Hanuma Vihari.
Four innings for Yorkshire have brought him eight wickets, two in each: 2 for 39 against Glamorgan at Neath, 2 for 58 at Hove, 2 for 34 against Worcestershire, and now 2 for 23 against Durham. One match of the stint is left, against Middlesex at Lord’s on Sunday, at the ground where he spent the ODI decider watching. Then he flies to Sri Lanka.