Ollie Pope: Identified
Welcome to the Impossible Job, son...
It would be very Bazball if, deprived of Ben Stokes, England decided to play without a captain. It’s the kind of paradigm-breaking move that Bazball makes, after all. And it should be possible, shouldn’t it? It’s not in the Laws that you must have one... Well, that’s not strictly true. It is in the Laws, but there’s a get-out clause:
Law 1.3.1 If at any time the captain is not available, a deputy shall act for him/her.
Law 1.3.2 If a captain is not available to nominate the players, then any person associated with that team may act as his/her deputy to do so.
Law 1.3.3 At any time after the nomination of the players, only a nominated player can act as deputy in discharging the duties and responsibilities of the captain as stated in these Laws, including at the toss.
So essentially, as long as someone is nominated to do the admin, you’re golden. It’s the Bazball way. Why not let Mark Wood captain the bowlers? Put Jamie Smith in charge of the slips? The batters know what order they’re supposed to bat in – go score some runs, lads. Baz is there for them during the breaks. In fact, Stokes will be there during the breaks, too. Joe Root has captained England in more Test matches than anyone else in history, and he’ll be out on the field. Let’s break the shackles, throw off the tyranny of convention…
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England has always had a thing about its captains. I’m reading Leo McKinstry’s biography of Bill Edrich at the moment. Edrich’s first England captain was Walter Hammond, who got the job after renouncing his status as a professional cricketer and becoming the director of a tyre company. This delighted Plum Warner, the chairman of selectors and a stickler for the England captain being an amateur.
Edrich failed in each of his first eight Test matches, but Hammond kept him in the side despite immense pressure to jettison the lad. He was proven right in Edrich’s ninth game, the Timeless Test in Durban, in which Bill made a double hundred and launched his epic career. In addition to the cricket, there was sneaky feeling that Hammond like having Edrich around because Bill’s prodigious philandering provided plenty of covering fire for the affair that Hammond was having with Sybil Ness-Harvey, described by one newspaper as ‘South Africa’s most beautiful woman’.
That was in 1939. By 1953, an ageing Edrich had been recalled the side at the urging of England’s first professional captain Len Hutton, and played the innings that essentially returned the Ashes after 19 years, a knife-edge 55 in the final Test of the summer at the Oval. Thanks to nerveless Bill, Hutton entered the pantheon of skippers to have achieved that feat, still the mark that England obsesses over.
It's why, I think, that the two captains revered and discussed above most of the other 79 to have held the job remain Douglas Jardine and Mike Brearley. Time makes Jardine to a degree unknowable, certainly in the modern sense. He was described at his memorial service by Sir Hubert Ashton as, “provocative, austere, brusque, shy, humble, thoughtful, kindly, proud, sensitive, single-minded and possessed of immense moral and physical courage.” His captaincy, centred around the merciless implementation of Bodyline, remains mythic.
As does Mike Brearley’s. At the time there seemed something magical about a man who could bring Botham back from the depths of his own broken captaincy during the 1981 Ashes, and also skipper Geoffrey Boycott, returning from self-imposed exile, to his 100th Hundred at Headingley. Such was Brearley’s hold over Australia that Rodney Hogg claimed he had “a degree in people,” while Kim Hughes, one of the captains on the losing end of Brearley’s 11 wins in 15 Ashes Tests, became so baffled by the gap between Brearley’s modest ability with the bat and his standing among the players that he reckoned, “he had nothing going for him except that he was intelligent.”
Geoffrey Boycott, whose psyche could be armour-plated, was comfortable enough with Brearley to show his vulnerability towards the end of the 1981 series. He was almost 41 years old, battle-weary after a lifetime of walking out to face the fastest bowlers in the world. He could sense the end approaching even if he didn’t want to admit it and he was short of runs, yet Brearley was able to reassure and soothe that often-tortured mind. He went out in the sixth match at the Oval and scored a valedictory century in what would be his final Test against Australia.
The captaincy has proven illusory, ineffably difficult, dependent on so many external factors coming together that it is impossible to blueprint, indefinable except as a job description. How do you do it? Being good at cricket isn’t enough. Botham and Flintoff both failed despite their on-field brilliance. Alastair Cook and Joe Root scored thousands and thousands of runs more than Mike Brearley, but their captaincies were characterised by monochrome stretches of grinding cricket, attritional incursions into an art that eluded them.
And perhaps art is the key. It’s the adjective that Brearley preferred for the title of his book on the subject. A truly great captain might have a general philosophy, but not really know what they will do until the game unfolds. Whatever that is, they will carry their soldiers with them. Michael Vaughan was an exemplar of that serenity. The players of 2005 adored him. They felt that he never panicked, even though Vaughan later confirmed that he was as terrified as everyone else as the series evolved in increasingly unlikely ways. His ability to think quickly was at its best when he called the team together on the Manchester outfield to show them the great Australians celebrating a mere draw on the balcony above.
In return England have hung captains out to dry. They have appointed four in a single summer. England captains might emerge from the job like Mike Atherton, with a record that reads played 54, won 13, lost 21, drawn 20, stats that reflect little more than the quality of the opposition and the derisory structure in which he operated. The fixture list was cruel to Botham, who got nine of his first ten Tests against West Indies in their pomp, and to Flintoff, who got the reverse mission to Australia post 2005. Andrew Strauss missed out on that hospital pass by the casting vote of the head coach and went on to succeed Flintoff and become one of England’s most successful captains.
Assessing a captain is hard. Sometimes only history can add the context that sound judgement needs. That’s why picking one is educated guesswork. I fell for the availability bias when thinking Stokes would be a poor choice, simply because it hadn’t worked out for Botham and Flintoff. Stokes may be their successor as a totemic all-rounder but he is a visionary leader in a way that they were not.
Ollie Pope is tough to get a handle on as a batsman, let alone a captain. What we know is that he has been ‘identified’ by Stokes and McCullum, and if there is a leitmotif of this era, it will be of being identified by that pair. It’s a mysterious process characterised by ‘vibes’ and observation and the ability to absorb aphorisms like “live where your feet are” and “run towards the danger” without laughing. Batters are identified as the kind of players who will bat how Bazball wants them to. Bowlers are identified for their pace, or in the case of Shoaib Bashir, via Twitter.
Pope was duly identified as a number three, in which he has been a qualified success. His wonderful 196 in Hyderabad demonstrated another of Bazball’s crucial metrics, the height of his ceiling, yet Pope’s problem is the lengthy amounts of time he spends on the lower floors between visits. He’s 26 now, but still resembles a Shirley Hughes drawing of a muddy toddler. He has none of Stokes’ awesome presence, so, like Mike Brearley, he will have to find another way.
How that will go is pretty much anyone’s guess. At least it’s not Australia away as a starting point.
For the little that it’s worth, I thought it unwise to give England’s most valuable player (Stokes) the captaincy, assuming it would be a burden he could do without. All that demonstrates is the chasm between being an external observer and someone with genuine insight. I was overly influenced by the past and needed to be “unburdened by what has been”.
Pope needs to be consistent with the bat to be deserved of captaincy. After 48 tests, his record is modest. Moreover, it will be interesting to see how his batting is affected as a captain.