If there was a negative to the brilliance of Ollie Pope as he hauled England’s second innings from the edge of calamity, it was that because of it too many will forget how the brilliance of Jasprit Bumrah had put them there.
For a while everything was going wrong for England, and it was hard to pinpoint the moment the slide had started. Was it when an Indian batter was dismissed first ball? Was it when their opponents’ premier bowler was hauled off after just two overs? Was it when their own batter survived an lbw appeal, or when a misfield gifted them four runs? It was hard to tell, partly because each of these incidents was superficially good for them, causing their fans to celebrate as their team moved ever closer to what still seems likely defeat.
At its best sport exposes and explores rarely visited crevasses of human psychology, and each of those events pushed Bumrah deeper into one of his. It would be an insult to his professionalism to suggest that he does not give his best at every moment, that there are spells where he is distracted, unbothered. His record certainly suggests otherwise. But something about the events at the start of the third day in Hyderabad provoked him to dip into a reserve of additional motivation.
Perhaps it started when Joe Root cleaned up his stumps at the first attempt, though it was hardly a unique humiliation – more than a quarter of Bumrah’s 50 Test innings have lasted two balls or fewer. However much of England’s second innings seemed destined to be a trial by spin, it must have smarted when he was replaced after conceding four runs and just one scoring stroke in two overs at its start.
When finally he came back, and after Pope had edged one just past his stumps, the last ball of his next over swung viciously into Ben Duckett and thumped him on the pad. After a dismissively brief consultation with Srikar Bharat, his wicketkeeper, Rohit Sharma chose not to review and there the matter ended, at least until midway through the following over when the stadium’s big screen showed first that it would have clattered into the meat of leg stump and then Bumrah, hands flung towards the heavens in histrionic frustration. When he next got a chance to bowl Duckett tucked his first delivery to midwicket, where it bounced over Yashasvi Jaiswal’s shoulder and away to the boundary.
Exactly what this collection of embarrassments and injustices meant to him was soon to become clear. When Duckett gloved a ball down the leg side for four, that clearly was enough. The 20 remaining deliveries of a wonderful Bumrah spell brought six runs and two wickets, starting with a beautiful inswinger that ripped out Duckett’s off-stump and had the bowler celebrating in roaring, fist-pumping style. In his next over Root was trapped lbw, and from there it was all Pope and Jonny Bairstow could do to survive. It is possible for a player to be insufficiently motivated but also for one to care too much, to replace control with overspilling emotion. For 20 glorious minutes Bumrah found the perfect balance.
By the time he bowled again the ball was old, Pope was settled, and a different narrative had taken root. The only hint in Pope’s first innings of what was to come in his second was its brevity. It is a rule of history that when the 26-year-old produces a significant Test innings the following things will be true: his other effort in the match will be poor or nonexistent, and England will win – and if that does not strike terror into Indian hearts at this point, nothing will. Sure, with the deficit 126 and four second-innings wickets still to take it is likely that nothing will, but that mighty, unbeaten 148 will have caused a few flutters.
This is Pope’s first game since he dislocated his shoulder last June, and on Thursday his rustiness seemed abundantly clear. What a mess that knock was, by turns clumsy and desperate, lucky to last as long as 11 deliveries. His return on Saturday started in similar vein and could easily have been similarly brief.
A double hit sent a reverse sweep alarmingly close to Bharat’s right glove and he would have been punished for a completely fluffed attempt to dispatch the ball over midwicket had the ball not bounced so enthusiastically it cleared the stumps and hit Bharat on the helmet. “Something needs to settle him, something just needs to calm Ollie Pope down,” said Kevin Pietersen on TV commentary.
By the end Pope was not just calm, he was positively zen, perfecting reverse paddles and no-look scoops with bullet-time serenity. Root described his innings as “an absolute masterclass in how to score runs in this part of the world”. What a transformation. This was the making of a new Pope, and the only white smoke was coming out of Indian ears.
