How do you evaluate a player like Ollie Pope? Every thread you try to follow merely unspools in a multitude of directions, every stat can be seen from two angles, revealing his potential while unmasking his frustrations.
He has seven tons v seven teams, a world first, but not one that, on close inspection, reflects wholly positively. It shows you can score runs against a variety of oppositions across several conditions, and seven tons is also just plenty by itself, more than the likes of MS Dhoni, Quinton de Kock and Imran Khan managed during their careers, and behind only Joe Root and Ben Stokes among England’s current lineup. But it also shows that you are yet to truly dominate an opposition or a series, and hints that the peaks are separated by extended lulls.
Only nine times in Test history has a player averaged less than 32 in a series while making a score of 150 or more. Two have come from Pope this year. Pope averages 32 in 2024 all in, the only player in Test history to make three hundreds in a calendar year while still averaging under 35.
And yet since the start of the Stokes era, Pope’s record remains decent, with an average of 37 - more than Zak Crawley and the captain himself - and two more hundreds than Ben Duckett, from just five more innings.
Shoaib Bashir in Test cricket:
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38 wickets @ 37.23
Despite playing only 11 matches, Jeetan Patel asserts that the off-spinner has the potential to be as good as R Ashwin.
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Given his feast-or-famine nature, it’s no surprise that’s Pope’s issue is starting his innings. When he gets to 25, he averages more than all of England’s current batters bar Joe Root. But he has done so in just seven of his 25 innings this year, falling in single figures on ten occasions. There is disagreement about whether this pattern is down to a flaw of temperament or technique, but it can be both. Perhaps Pope looks to race through the first part of his innings because he doesn’t trust his defence to get him there in the usual fashion.
Still, the jury remains out, with Pope neither a total success nor an unmitigated failure. But after enough hung verdicts, the rules change. Pakistan was a new low, Pope averaging 11 and failing to reach 30 all series, and while Jamie Smith’s parental leave for the New Zealand tour means Pope is guaranteed to start that series, it also presents a possible path out of the side for him.
Jordan Cox will keep in Jamie Smith’s absence. The former Kent keeper promised to “do a Harry Brook” when he moved to Essex, and came good on his promise, averaging 66 with four hundreds in the County Championship. It was thanks to an enforced wicketkeeping absence that Brook got his chance to lay an unanswerable claim to a Test starting berth. It is not beyond Cox to do the same.
But the threat isn’t from Cox alone. Smith’s masterful 89 at Rawalpindi underlined his class, but while the power he displayed in lofting six times over the ropes suggests he can make a success of the No.7 slot, it was also an innings that showed how much more there is to come. He dug in first, making nine off 31 balls, and built a proper partnership with No.8 Gus Atkinson, and the one weakness he has shown so far, at times, is in batting with the tail. He can still be an asset there, because he’s that talented, but England will be tempted to try and maximise his output by removing the gloves and pushing him up the order. Should Cox have even a passable series with bat and gloves - a fifty or two, no goobers behind the stumps - and Pope fail to catch light, England might decide that Smith plus Cox adds up to more than Pope plus Smith.
England will arrive at the start of next summer facing a defining 10 Test stretch against India and Australia, a below-par 2024 shaking their plans. The batting lineup that starts that summer will be the one they hope can bring home the Ashes in the winter. Pope has three Tests to prove he belongs in it.
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