When his side needed reassurance, skittish Pope gifted wicket away

Ollie Pope was surprised. Balls pitched on a good length had been troubling the England batsmen, particularly Dan Lawrence, whose response had been to shimmy down the pitch and then attempt to drive a ball so far away from him in line and length that it required something considerably longer than a cricket bat.
The edge was inevitable, and so in came the England captain under a little bit of pressure. The first ball from Lahiru Kumara was short of a length and it bounced sharply, as well as leaving him. It was quick too, at 86mph, and Pope very nearly nicked it. Surprised he certainly was. It was not a good start.
Admirably, before the match Pope had admitted to the twin burdens of captaincy and batting weighing heavily upon him at Emirates Old Trafford.
But this was different. In Manchester, Sri Lanka had batted first, so that Pope had waited to bat, with field placings and bowling changes still whirling in his head. Here, to widespread amazement, Sri Lanka had opted to field first when winning the toss again.
It looked like a batting day, it walked like a batting day and sounded like a batting day, so it probably was a batting day. England like to chase, as Ben Stokes so famously once said, but even they wanted to bat here.
This was a prime opportunity for Pope to score some runs to quell the criticism after making only 12 runs at Old Trafford. For he really does seem to attract the solid stuff more easily than most. Having penned a piece this week about his failed reverse-sweep in the first Test, the ferocity of the below-the-line responses against him was interesting.
It is not just that many feel that Pope should not temporarily be England captain in place of the injured Stokes, it is that they feel he should not be in the team at all. And it is true that Pope is the most vulnerable of England’s top six (assuming a fit-again Zak Crawley will replace Lawrence for the next series in Pakistan) and yet he has long been vice-captain. It is an odd dichotomy.
But it is also true that he is filling the problematic No 3 position when better suited to lower down the order, as are so many other players these days.
That was where the gap in the order was when Brendon McCullum and Stokes took over, and they identified Pope as being the man to fill it. They have backed him from ball one of Bazball as both a leader and a batsman. As a result, when it comes to the sort of “brutal” selections Pope mentioned pre-match, he will always receive plenty of leeway.
Even after scoring only one here, he still averages 41.53 at No 3. Yes, that does include 205 against Ireland, but even when taking that out (which is always unfair), his average is 37.23. He is no dud.
But, as remarked upon so many times by so many people over the years, he is a very poor starter. As the BBC’s Andy Zaltzman noted, it was the 32nd time in 84 Test innings that he has been out within the first 20 balls of his innings. Newborn fawns can appear steadier sometimes.
Pope scored a single from his third ball here, and that was it. By the time it came to his tenth ball from Asitha Fernando, who had changed ends from the Pavilion to the Nursery, he seemed rattled by the accumulation of dot balls and played a horrible-looking pull shot that hit top edge rather than middle to be caught.
Imposing oneself upon the bowler early on is important, especially to this England team, and Pope often does that very well to the quicks when advancing down the pitch, but this was ugly.
Sides seek reassurance from their leader, but here England found only skittishness from their man. He was simply in no position to play the stroke. All his weight was on his front foot and his back foot slipped and spun.
Much is made of great players such as Ricky Ponting having been able to pull off the front foot, but Ponting would still push back off from the toes of that front foot, which then allows your hands to go high and out towards gully, because this is, after all, a cross-batted shot.
But with his front foot planted Pope could not move his hands in that manner and was therefore tucked up close to his body (rather than with arms extended in front of him), which is when danger always presents itself in a pull shot.
It was a waste; the sort of gift to Sri Lanka that became rather a theme during the day, as England, the brilliant Joe Root aside, tried their very best to vindicate Sri Lanka’s gamble at the toss, with Ben Duckett bound to cop flak in particular for his dismissal from a reverse-sweep. However, according to Sky Sports, it was his 46th reverse-sweep in Tests, from which he has scored 90 runs for only twice out.
As I said when Pope was out reverse-sweeping, execution is key, and while Pope’s blade in Manchester was closed too early, Duckett’s here was left too open too long, thus the top edge.
All attacking strokes carry a risk, but here England’s captain had set a tone of impetuous imprecision to which even the regal Root eventually succumbed.