When Ollie Pope was confirmed as Ben Stokes’ fill-in as England Test captain, he would have hoped for far more than 13 runs from his first three innings in the job.

It’s a run of form that has heightened scrutiny on his record, and in a way, you can see why. There’s not Zak Crawley’s arc, from struggler to consistent run-scorer. He’s not averaging 50 like Joe Root or 60 like Harry Brook. Ben Duckett is scoring quicker than any opener in history. Jamie Smith’s seamless entrance shows the talent that exists outside the team.

But Pope is doing fine. More than fine, really. Before this series, he was averaging 41.45 since Ben Stokes took over as captain. Forget the bluster and bravado and look at England’s results; this is a team that has improved under Ben Stokes and Brendon McCullum thanks to players that are improving, and Pope has been an important part of that.

There are quibbles, naturally. The overall career average still sits below 35, so you’d expect there to be gaps in the ledger. Chief among these is his record against Australia and India, averaging 22 from 18 Tests against the two dominant teams of the era. There’s also his fourth innings record, with one score above 25 in 17 innings. But there are caveats to both of these. Pope was denied a proper chance to overcome his struggles against Australia last summer by a shoulder injury, and while his series in India earlier this year faded out, he began it with one of the greatest innings an Englishman has played against the turning ball. That fourth innings sample size is still small, and there are true greats who never had a statement chasing knock. Steve Waugh, for example, averaged 25.54 with two fifties and no hundreds batting last.

The suggestion that his record is bolstered solely by big scores against weak teams is also wide of the mark. All good batters will cash in when conditions are in their favour, and Pope’s record against South Africa, who have a top-class bowling attack, is exceptional, averaging 63.57.

Still, Pope’s Test efforts are yet to quite match up to what is promised by his totemic county numbers, and by the ease with which he bats at his best. It’s possible there are chinks in that picture-perfect technique: while he does seem to get more than his share of very good balls, perhaps there’s something in his game that makes them look very good, and another player would just block them out. His first dismissal this series is a case in point, his bat coming across an Asitha Fernando delivery that came back in to hit off stump. However, the issue feels more temperamental. Pope likes to think of himself as busy, but his starts are better described as ‘frenetic’. You can see a desperation to score, to impose himself. Today, kept quiet for nine balls, he tried to pull a ball from Asitha Fernando that cramped him up and top-edged to the fielder.

Coming through as a technically correct touch player, Pope was naturally compared to Joe Root, and you wonder if that’s part of the issue. Root is one of the best starters the game has ever seen, the cliche of ‘looking up and he’s on 30’ holding true throughout his career. Pope isn’t as good as Root, and especially not at starting out, and so shouldn’t expect to be able to match his ease at the start of an innings. In fact, he is one of England’s worst starters. Since Pope’s recall to the England side at the end of 2019, 12 top-seven batters have played 20 or more innings. Pope is the worst of these at getting to 25, doing so in just 35 per cent of his innings. Root and Stokes do so in over half of their knocks, while Brook’s 25-rate is up over 70 per cent. In this era of ‘refined Bazball’, perhaps the best advice to Pope would be to shelve his shots for the first half hour of each innings he plays, because once he’s past that, he excels.

But, on the whole, he has done a good job as England’s Test No.3, and that has not been something you can say about many England Test No.3s in the past decade, since the retirement of Jonathan Trott. The issue for Pope is that England are, for once, a team looking up rather than down. The rest of the middle order is excelling, leaving Pope under pressure by default. And the current team management are comfortable dropping players who don’t ‘deserve’ it, if they see a better option available. Think Jack Leach at the start of this summer, who had developed admirably under Stokes’ watchful gaze, left out because Shoaib Bashir was deemed the more promising prospect. Think Ben Foakes last summer, the blameless victim of Jonny Bairstow’s return from injury.

Pope has therefore been aided by the ambivalent form of Dan Lawrence in his foray as a Test opener. But the greater threat may come from Essex’s Jordan Cox, who predicted a Harry Brook-type summer for himself at the start of 2024 and has delivered, notching 904 runs at 75.33 in the County Championship, with four hundreds. Upon being left out of England’s team for the first Sri Lanka Test, he promptly made the trip down to Southampton to crack a Hampshire attack featuring three Test bowlers for 141 at better than a run a ball. He is in the form of his life. Even if Pope keeps doing fine, if there comes a time when Stokes and McCullum feel Cox is the better option, they won’t hesitate to make the switch.

England have invested plenty in Pope, and he has repaid that to some degree. They will likely keep backing him for the near future, but a score sooner rather than later will ensure they aren’t tempted to look elsewhere.

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