Aggressive fields, dodgy review – Pope’s captaincy under microscope

Ollie Pope had a good first day as England Test captain. It had promised to be an outstanding one, but conditions and Sri Lanka’s fighting spirit conspired to make things harder than seemed likely shortly after lunch. Even so, when Pope himself coolly ran out Vishwa Fernando to bring their innings to an end at 5.25pm, his team held the upper hand.
As Pope walked off thanking his bowlers for their efforts in icy winds, his deputy, Harry Brook, offered him a congratulatory pat on the back for his part in a mission accomplished. Pope must have been relieved.
If he had been greedy, he might have imagined beforehand that scoring a big hundred — as Joe Root and Alastair Cook did on their first days in the job — would represent the ideal start, but while personal runs are important for someone keen to cement their authority, the true measure of a cricket captain is their grasp of tactics when their side are bowling. In this respect, most judges would have awarded him high marks.
The fields he set were recognisably derived from the Ben Stokes school of all-out aggression. Both men insisted in the build-up that Pope would be his own man and Stokes’s presence in the dressing room would not inhibit his deputy, but the situation is nevertheless a highly unusual one, especially in a home Test.
Normally, injured players are removed from the team environment until they are fit again, but here not only is Stokes very much present but before the start he delivered a speech in the team huddle directed partly at Pope. The message, apparently, was: “Be your own man.” Pope then spoke, repeating a message he had already given to the team, that tactics were not going to change.
He also warned that if he won the toss, England would be bowling. As it happened, he lost the toss and Sri Lanka chose to bat, so he got what he wanted without the burden of having to justify the decision of inserting on a ground where no team have ever won a Test after choosing to bowl first.
If three quick wickets with the new ball provided the perfect launch pad, Pope and England were made to work after that for their rewards in conditions that were not especially helpful. The pitch played well, the ball did not do a huge amount, and in the final session bad light led the umpires to veto the use of pace bowling.
The first 34 overs of the innings brought seven wickets but the next 36 just one more. England’s new captain strove to remain patient but could not resist burning two reviews. His brow furrowed and so did that of Stokes, looking on from the home team’s balcony.
Overall, Pope shuffled his attack to good effect — Mark Wood took a wicket with his seventh ball and Shoaib Bashir with his ninth — and set some imaginative fields for Bashir, posting two leg slips and a short leg for the left-handers Kamindu Mendis and Milan Rathnayake.
His insistence on keeping in plenty of close catchers paid dividends when Dhananjaya de Silva, the Sri Lanka captain, was eventually caught at leg slip for a well-made 74.
Pope’s short-ball fields for Gus Atkinson were straight out of the Stokes playbook — men flung deep on both sides of the wicket — and they might have brought the wicket of Prabath Jayasuriya had Atkinson not overdone the ploy slightly. When Jayasuriya messily fended a snorter off his face, sending a looping catch to Root at gully, it was called a no-ball as the third bouncer of the over.
It hardly mattered: duly softened up, Jayasuriya failed to get properly behind his shot two balls later and nicked off to the wicketkeeper, Jamie Smith.
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Importantly, too, Pope had made the right call earlier in the week — long before he removed the tags from his new captain’s blazer — when he agreed with the head coach, Brendon McCullum, that England needed to replace the injured Stokes with a bowler (Matthew Potts) rather than a batsman (Jordan Cox).
Potts did not bowl particularly well but his presence meant that Pope always had options and did not have to worry about anyone’s workload. He knew the kind of balance of attack he wanted to handle. “I’ve watched Stokesy closely on the pitch, the way he’s managed his bowlers,” Pope said on the eve of the match. “It’s making sure I can get the best out of the guys.”
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With Pope needing a different perspective on things, and the injured Zak Crawley being absent from the slips, the close catchers had to be rearranged. Pope stood at mid-off for Chris Woakes and at gully for Atkinson, while he palmed off short-leg duties on Dan Lawrence. Ah, the privileges of captaincy. Enjoy it while you can, skip, you’ll be back there soon enough.
Pope’s temporary elevation to the captaincy continues a curious tradition among Surrey players as stand-in England Test captains. Of the other eight players from the county to lead England in Tests, five first did so only because the first-choice captain had been ruled out: Walter Read (1888), Monty Bowden (1889), John Edrich (1975), Alec Stewart (1993) and Mark Butcher (1999).
Since the Second World War only Stewart and Peter May among Surrey cricketers have been formally appointed to the role. Pope hopes to follow them one day, but there can be many a slip ’twixt cup and lip.