Ollie Pope takes captaincy reins but shadow of Stokes looms large

As the day and Sri Lanka’s innings drew towards its close, with England forced to bowl spin from both ends because it was too dark to safely attempt anything faster, Ollie Pope was one of five players still with sunglasses perched on their heads. At the end of both lunch and tea these players had emerged back into the Manchester gloom with shades in place, just in case things should suddenly and unexpectedly brighten. It was hard not to conclude from this spectacle that this is not just an inherently aggressive team, it is an unfailingly optimistic one.

This was Pope’s time to shine. The day had begun with a pre-match huddle that had as many speakers as a night at the Democratic national convention, and incidentally as many voluntarily deposed former leaders named Joe. Ben Stokes spoke at length, Brendon McCullum followed, and Pope as stand-in captain indicated that he knew both his place and the limits of his audience’s patience with some brief concluding remarks, which presumably amounted to: “What they said.” On the eve of the match he had promised that the team would hear “a lot of the same messages from a different voice”, and he had been half right.

Stokes later described his attitude to watching his team being led by another man. “At the end of the day, you’ve got to trust the person who’s out there to do the job. For this week and the remaining two games it’s going to be Popey,” he said. “He’s got to be the one to make the decisions. I’ve told him: ‘Look, I’m not going to step on your feet.’” Perhaps, though, it did feel that Pope emerged from that huddle with a few bruised toes.

A few minutes later he led his team out into sunshine. For Sri Lanka the gloom descended a little sooner than it did for anyone else: within an hour they were three down; half an hour later the floodlights were on; by mid‑afternoon several residents of the on-site hotel, an unseasonally bitter wind blowing across the ground and into their faces as they watched the game from their balconies, had taken to wearing their duvets.

Pope’s brightness, meanwhile, remained undimmed. He had lost his first international toss, but any concern that he might be an unlucky leader lasted only as long as it took Dhananjaya de Silva to volunteer for the fate England had planned for him anyway by choosing to bat. And so Pope took to the field, and got busy.

The common criticism of Pope’s batting is that he is overly frenetic in the early stages of an innings, but in time settles down. It turns out that he captains in precisely the same way, though it took some time for him to be becalmed. Initially he positioned himself at mid-off, as captains often do, allowing him constant communication with the bowlers and by way of bonus to insist that the ball passed through his hands on its way back to them before each delivery. This at least distracted him from the wilder extremes of fielding micromanagement, though he would come on to those and there were periods – quite long periods – when not a ball went past without him nudging someone somewhere.

View image in fullscreen Ollie Pope celebrates with Gus Atkinson as everything went right early on for the new England captain. Photograph: Stu Forster/Getty Images

With attention inevitably drawn to the batters’ battle for supremacy against the bowlers, it is not often that you tear your eyes away from the obvious action to watch a captain actually captaining. It can be a surprisingly hectic business, a process of constantly seeking and catching the eyes of teammates, reassuring and questioning, shifting and sticking, applauding and gesticulating. More than anything just so much gesticulating, near-constant windmilling arms: on this occasion not even Pope’s least impactful of adjustments could be described as pointless.

At first it all seemed so easy. Dimuth Karunaratne top-edged a pull off Gus Atkinson and was caught behind; Nishan Madushka nicked Chris Woakes to slip; Angelo Mathews was trapped lbw after a mystifying leave, and the first three wickets of the match had fallen before Sri Lanka reached double figures. The last and only time a team batting first in England had lost three wickets for fewer runs it was 1896.

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By lunch Pope seemed not so much lucky as downright blessed. By then it was 80 for five, and Dinesh Chandimal had just been trapped lbw by a ball that barely bounced, at this stage of the game and on an obviously benign pitch an absolute freak of a delivery. Soon afterwards Kamindu Mendis crashed Woakes through point for four, the bowler changed angle and from round the wicket immediately found the edge, though the way he embraced Mark Wood in the ensuing celebration suggested it was his fellow bowler rather than his captain who was responsible for that flash of inspiration.

The true tests were still to come. An attempt to bounce out De Silva and Prabath Jayasuriya felt straight from the Stokes playbook and kind of worked, though the wicket came when Jayasuriya was surprised by one that was pitched up. De Silva and, more unexpectedly, the debutant Milan Rathnayake delayed but could not deny England, and in the end it was Pope himself who ended Sri Lanka’s innings with a smart bit of fielding.

For the side temporarily known as his, the day’s play and their insistence on sporting those sunglasses demonstrated and reinforced the same belief: even in those moments when the present is gloomy, the future is bright.

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