The danger is that they may yet find themselves shackled to all this freedom. England’s team as it stands, individually and collectively, is seeking to locate that line and walk along it.
Others need to know they won’t be turfed out at the first sign of mischief. It serves as a protective layer against themselves. Some cricketers, some batters at least, need the straitjacket to secure them to the job in hand. The buttoned-up world of Test cricket as it’s stood for a century and more and which characterised the cement-and-water era into which he first emerged has been upended by something dizzyingly strange and loose. Indeed it’s possible that what Pope needed after all was an environment where some latent smidge of devilry could be teased out. It’s about being who you want to be, and getting loaded, and having a good time. It’s about freedom the freedom from fear. The philosophy, as we keep being reminded, is always to walk at the danger. The game is about scoring runs, and finding best options to score runs.” You have to find ways when pitches are favourable to bowlers to get them off their line and length. The urge to take a step down the track, as he did inside the first half hour today, is embraced, with Paul Collingwood, assistant coach, even applauding the logic: “He used his feet and went across the line to clip it through mid-wicket. Under Stokes, it’s beginning to fall into place. He came into this match with a Test average south of 30.
Yet his early forays with England were skittish things, marked by flashes of class, the odd day out, and some vintage Bellian swearing after another fatal dab outside the eyeline. Pope’s talent and essential orthodoxy had seen him earmarked for the role basically from the moment he started guzzling hundreds at The Oval. To bat at three for England is a privilege and historically a nightmare. What he probably didn’t know at the time of that call was that he’d be assigned an old-fashioned role for a newfangled era. He was told he was valued, rated, and needed. That springtime phone call to Stokes reaffirmed a few things. A part of me wishes I could go back and do it all again.” “I tried to change things too quickly, rather than stick to what works for me and what I was doing.
“ I tried to change too much,” he later said. His lowest point came at Hobart in January, when he was bowled round his legs in a fuzzy state of nastiness, his shoulders misaligned to his hips, simultaneously closed off and too open, his legs stuck on off-stump, his bat a flailing afterthought. He takes a lot on, but with that has come a tendency to get enmeshed in the minutiae of technique, leading to a kind of psychological paralysis caused by theory-overload.įor much of the last year, he’s been a batting blur of conflicting theories and techniques, as jittery as a lab rat, jabbed and poked out of shape and mind. More than that, he’s pushy (in a good way), calling up his new captain to formally declare for the No.3 slot and he listens, intently, and sometimes to voices best ignored. Pope is a striver, the kind of upstanding upstart who does well at school, runs the first one hard and gets the kebabs in after a big win. It’s a job he craves more than life itself.
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