4 minute read

There are winners and losers with every England Test squad announcement, but the first one after an Ashes tour tends to feature bigger, clearer signposts for the years ahead. Ollie Pope looks to be one of the less immediately obvious casualties of the greater disloyalty Rob Key promised us.

Looking back on the piece we wrote in March about the likely beneficiaries and victims of this new policy, we pretty much got it spot on. (Broken clocks and all that.)

Jamie Smith is not out; Zak Crawley is out; Will Jacks is out; Matt Potts is now behind at least five other seamers – probably more; while Jofra Archer and Mark Wood are neither in nor out.

We didn’t predict Sarah Taylor’s heartening promotion to the previously undervalued role of fielding coach (damn that’s a good move), but we did make a point of stating that Pope would still be out. That may have seemed redundant given he’d already been dropped from the XI midway through the Ashes, but the nature of touring meant he was still in the vicinity of the team back then. Yesterday, we got a clearer sense of where he now stands.

And where does he stand, exactly?

Earlier this year, we spent a period repeatedly falling asleep during episodes of the Star Wars series, Ahsoka. The finer points of the plot are a bit hazy, what with the whole not being conscious thing, but we’re pretty sure one of the key elements is that Grand Admiral Thrawn – an imperial leader who apparently blue himself – is stranded in another galaxy.

That’s a long way away, isn’t it? That’s not a place where you want to find yourself stranded. People casually hop about from planet to planet in Star Wars, but another galaxy? No-one wants to be a million light years from home – particularly if you’re reliant on the whims of passing space whales to get back again.

Pope is probably not in space whale territory, but he’s no longer in England’s first team and the squad tells us he’s now behind James Rew as well. Chances are he’s even further back in the queue than that.

Without going to the trouble of finding actual quotes, Key will have announced the return of Ollie Robinson by saying something along the lines of, ‘there’s always a route back into the England team, the door is never closed on anyone’ – or clichés to that effect. But what is the route for Pope now? And how long is it?

(Dis)prove yourself

The problem Pope’s got is one that many mid-career dropped players face: he’s played a lot of Test cricket. As with Crawley, that means his task is not really to prove himself, but to disprove himself. England already have a pretty good idea how Pope will perform because he’s already played 64 Tests.

Here we can draw a distinction with Crawley, because Pope has been… okay. Where Crawley’s record is standard-settingly woeful for batters who have played so many games (five hundreds in 64 Tests and an average of 31.18), Pope has made nine hundreds and averaged 34.55. He’s basically Mark Butcher.

There’s worse company to keep, but that’s also roughly the point at which Butcher’s career ended. Patience wears ever thinner at this sort of performance level and Pope can no longer make himself more appealing with a ‘youthful promise’ free gift.

However, unlike Crawley, Pope is actually up against it a bit if he wants to change people’s minds through weight of runs in first-class cricket. Crawley averages 31.49 in first-class cricket and were that number to start tracking upwards, one might reasonably assume it was the result of some meaningful improvement to his game.

But Pope is tarred by his own achievements – he has always made first-class runs. Back in 2022, when he was averaging 33 in Test cricket, Wisden reported that his non-Test first-class average was 66.42.

In other words, Ollie Pope is a man who can perform better than almost anyone in the entire history of first-class cricket and yet still play worse than Mike Gatting at Test level.

He’ll have to hope England don’t see things that way, otherwise he’s going to have to thumb for a lift off a galaxy-hopping space whale.