Pope’s reverse-sweep was right choice – but he needs runs as a leader

For a right-handed batsman, facing a left-arm spinner bowling over the wicket into the rough around leg stump can be tricky, frustrating even. Just ask the great Sachin Tendulkar, who was stumped for the only time in his 200-Test career when famously losing patience with Ashley Giles using such a tactic in Bangalore in 2001.
In Manchester on Saturday the motives were rather different, but the England captain Ollie Pope can probably blame his batting partner at the time, Dan Lawrence, for the Sri Lanka left-arm spinner Prabath Jayasuriya adopting the same ploy over the wicket and claiming his scalp. As England chased 205 to win, Jayasuriya was into his fifth over, having bowled in the conventional manner from round the wicket to the right-handers (he had bowled over the wicket to the left-handed Ben Duckett and been reverse-swept for four), but an astonishing shot from Lawrence had halted all that.
Much was made afterwards of the Sri Lanka captain Dhananjaya de Silva, who caught Pope at slip from a reverse-sweep, signalling to Jayasuriya as if there had been a plan to snare the England captain in that exact manner. However, it had been England’s makeshift opener advancing down the pitch to Jayasuriya — ensuring his front pad was outside the line of off stump — and then simply shovelling (there is no better description) the ball with a flick of the wrists for four through the leg side that had forced the initial change.
Since the Tendulkar stumping in 2001, the laws have been tweaked to avoid negative bowling outside leg stump — and indeed in 2023 Jayasuriya was called for wides a few times in a tense Test in New Zealand — but a bowler can still aim to hit leg stump on the angle, and with some turn, so that, if he maintains a good length, the batsman has some tough decisions to make. They can just pad the ball away if it is obviously pitching outside leg stump, because he cannot be given out leg-before in that instance, and that is what Pope did to his second ball from Jayasuriya from over the wicket on Saturday.
He just kicked it away. But not many players like doing that. So, to both his first ball and the third that proved to be his last, Pope had determined upon a very modern response: the reverse-sweep. When that then proved to be his downfall, there was something of an uproar. Had England lost the Test, you suspect it might have approached the levels of infamy that Mike Gatting’s botched attempt at the stroke did after the 1987 World Cup final defeat by Australia.
No matter that Pope had played the shot to such devastating effect when making his sublime 196 in Hyderabad last winter, scoring 35 runs from it. The general feeling of dissatisfaction seemed to be that he was the England captain now and should know better. It was nonsense, of course — something that was underlined in the next over from Jayasuriya when Lawrence and Joe Root, who was later hailed for his old-fashioned approach in taking England over the winning line (leading to his team-mates calling him “Geoff” after Mr Boycott), both played reverse-sweeps.
With the pitch having slowed from the first innings and with less bounce (when the ball is bouncing, sweeps can obviously be dangerous), it was a good option, but like all shots it just needs to be executed precisely. Pope was a little unfortunate in that the ball hit the toe-end of his bat and looped to slip, probably because he was too intent on rolling his wrists quickly and did so too fast. But he was not trying to make some sort of Bazball statement as captain. It was probably England’s least Bazball-like Test, after all. Instead it was confirmation of Pope’s problems early in an innings. When I said before that Pope was a worse starter than prawn cocktail, it was no fishy tale.
He had a disappointing Test at Emirates Old Trafford with the bat, scoring only six in each innings, but at least his side won, which is more than they did during Ben Stokes’s first stab at captaincy in 2020 against West Indies. But Stokes did make scores of 43 and 46 in that match, and others in recent times have fared even better — Root making 190 against South Africa on his captaincy debut in 2017 and Alastair Cook, Kevin Pietersen and Andrew Strauss all making centuries.
Generally, Pope has had a mixed summer with the bat (in the Hundred he scored only 35 runs in five innings for London Spirit), but he has made a century and two fifties from his six Test innings, and a lack of runs as a leader is a narrative he will want to stop in its tracks as soon as he can, admitting afterwards that the clear compartmentalisation of leadership and batting duties is his one main lesson from this first Test in charge. “From a mindset point of view, that’s just a little learning for me, that I can just draw a line once we’re off the field, get my pads on and that’s my time to focus on myself because that’s what’s best for the team,” he said.
He has had his share of critics already, those who believe that his average of 34.64 from 47 Tests is simply not good enough, but it has to be said that he averages 42.60 since being promoted to the problem position of No3 in the order. He can play, but I think he can play better and more consistently. That figure at three should be his overall Test average.
In the first innings in Manchester he was undone by a useful nip-backer from Asitha Fernando, complete with some familiar technical shortcomings, but he made immediate plans to combat that by standing outside his crease to the same bowler in the second innings. It was a sound idea. He had been done for length, so the solution is to alter that length by getting closer to the ball, something Root does all the time.
There were definite signs in that short second innings that Pope was rediscovering some rhythm and flow — two critical elements to his game that had clearly been lost in the Hundred.
As a captain in the field, Pope was excellent. As Root told Sky Sports: “He was very good at changing things up, trying different things and constantly trying to move the game in the right direction.”
There were clearly plans in place — I particularly liked the one to snare De Silva at leg slip off Shoaib Bashir in the first innings — and he looked in charge, passing that age-old test that if you walk into the ground and do not know beforehand who the captain is, would you know immediately who it was? You did. It was not captaincy by committee. He was busy, active and authoritative, while obviously listening to others’ counsel.
In truth he wasn’t aided by Matthew Potts bowling so rustily in the first innings (he was much improved in the second) or by Bashir’s second-innings effort, in which both the wickets and maidens columns remained on zero after 20 overs, or indeed Mark Wood’s injury. But he and his side got the job done, which, ultimately, is all that matters.
And, happily, he got to get out of the dreaded short-leg position, handing it, almost ceremonially, on the first day to Lawrence, who just happened to be Pope’s captain in the Hundred. Leadership does have its perks.