3 minute readRemember a couple of years ago when Ollie Pope was picked to bat at number three for England even though he’d never batted higher than four in first-class cricket? Well it’s gone so well he’s earned a promotion to number six and also won back the wicketkeeping gloves. This has
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Root’s runs, Gus Botham, Ollie Pope’s ‘leadership potential’ and Top Fernando Watch – an England v Sri Lanka second Test recap
3 minute readYou may have guessed that we didn’t see much of this one. But that’s okay – we can read a scorecard with the best of them. England won. It is 2-0. Here are some things that apparently happened… Joe Root one-ups himself Has Joe Root finally hit upon a way
Continue readingWas Jasprit Bumrah’s yorker to Ollie Pope the best since Waqar Younis?
3 minute readWe’re not saying that the delivery with which Jasprit Bumrah bowled Ollie Pope was the best post-Waqar yorker. All we’re saying is that a decent case can be made and that’ll do for today. First things first, the greatest yorker of all time was bowled by Waqar Younis at some
Continue reading5 things to watch out for as Brendon McCullum’s England take on Brendon McCullum’s New Zealand
6 minute readHas any man credited with such great influence over two teams ever had less direct influence on either? Brendon McCullum undoubtedly laid foundations for the current New Zealand side. Just as Nasser Hussain added vertebrae to England between 1999 and 2003 before they delivered higher profile successes, McCullum set the
Continue readingPope, pitches, pacesetters: 3 county cricket talking points we don’t want to talk about
3 minute readThat’s the royal we. These aren’t things that we, the county cricket community, are for some reason collectively overlooking. These are just three things that we, King Cricket, don’t really want to talk about for one reason or another. That’s what we’ve chosen to talk about today: the things we
Continue readingPeople think Ollie Pope’s a wicketkeeper, but Ollie Pope is not a wicketkeeper, but oh wait, turns out he is a wicketkeeper… for England
2 minute readThe plot of The Terminator is that the machines send a cyborg back in time to kill Sarah Connor and the humans send Kyle Reese to stop it. The whole fate of humanity relies on Reese doing the job. That’s the plan for saving the species. The whole plan is
Continue readingLet’s anchor Ollie Pope as a flighty middle-order shotmaker and see where he takes us
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Continue readingMorkel Burns Pope (and now for some commas)
2 minute readSurrey have won the County Championship. You win 10 of 12 matches and draw the other two and these things happen. We were checking the averages in the first division of the County Championship earlier today and two things struck us. Firstly, very few people have averaged over 40 and
Continue readingIs Ollie Pope poised to go papal on India? Does anyone know what that would involve?
2 minute readWe found ourself talking about Ollie Pope quite a bit early this season, way back when they played County Championship cricket semi-regularly. The ability to counter green pitch dobblery in April may not be wholly relevant to the challenge of facing India at the back end of an arid British
Continue readingWe’re mostly talking about Ollie Pope again this week, with maybe a dash of James Hildreth and a soupcon of Keaton Jennings
2 minute readA combination of (a) the current state of the England cricket team and (b) the nature of early season cricket means that we’ve almost exclusively been talking about batsmen so far this summer. This isn’t actually all that great for those of us who consider batsmen necessary impediments to the
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