Unplayable deliveries? No, Brook and Pope could have done better

Harry Brook could not believe it. It was as though he wanted the umpires to check with local meteorologists whether some sort of earthquake had caused the stumps to be disturbed rather than the ball from the left-arm spinner Prabath Jayasuriya that had dismissed him. It was certainly a blast from nowhere. It was not quite Shane Warne’s “ball of the century” in 1993, but it was a very passable imitation by a finger spinner rather than a wrist spinner.
Hitherto Jayasuriya had barely turned a ball. Now suddenly this one arced into Brook’s leg stump before hitting the surface and taking off in an altogether different direction towards the off stump, which was by now left unguarded by Brook because he had given himself a little bit of room, intending to knock the ball with a straight bat into the leg side off the back foot.
In truth, it required that sort of delivery to get rid of Brook. He had looked in utterly sublime nick. There had been one moment when, in frustration at the Sri Lankans’ 7-2 off-side field, he had unsuccessfully attempted a ramp shot at seamer Milan Rathnayake, but otherwise his half-century had been a classy compilation of stunning drives through mid-on, mid-off and extra cover.
A sixth Test century had appeared almost a formality for this wonderfully uncomplicated player, who now averages 59.75 in Test cricket. Remarkably, in only one of his 16 Tests in which he has batted twice has he failed to make at least one fifty, and that was when he scored 32 & 46 in the first Ashes Test at Edgbaston last year. His consistency is astonishing.
Mind you, money will probably have been wagered on Joe Root making his 33rd Test century after the manner in which he began his innings here, all calm accumulation and fluency as he eased to 42 before surprisingly edging behind. But this has been a match of surprises, with a couple of fiendish deliveries to dismiss two of the Sri Lankans on the first day and, even before the beauty that castled Brook, there had been a very useful ball from Asitha Fernando that bowled the new England captain, Ollie Pope.
“Unplayable” was a word used to describe that ball, not least by the great Kumar Sangakkara, who knows his onions no doubt, but was it really? It was certainly a very good ball that nipped back, but surely Pope will know that he could have played it better. The Australian David Boon is the match referee here at this game and he always said that he received only one ball in his 107 Tests — from the West Indian Curtly Ambrose — that he could not have played any better. All his other dismissals were down to his own errors.
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We batsmen, particularly in the angry, unfathomable immediate aftermath of getting out, like to make out that the blame lies elsewhere, but so often it does not. For instance, if Brook had not given himself that little bit of room, might he have been better placed to counter that ball from Jayasuriya? This is not to diss the bowlers’ skills, even if the Australian spinner Nathan Lyon did say in an excellent masterclass before play began that, for all the plans and the intentions, he never knew what was going to happen at the other end once the ball had been bowled.
But I thought Pope could have got forward to that ball from Fernando. It was a good-length ball and he was defeated by the length first before the seam movement did for him. He was caught on the crease, squaring himself up so that his hands could only be thrust out on front of him and ultimately across the line of the ball as his head toppled to the off side.
On Sky Sports, Nasser Hussain and Mark Butcher did a superb piece of technical analysis on Pope at the tea break, complete with a number of clips of him being bowled by some seriously good balls. But as the old sages of county cricket always used to say, good players should not get bowled that often. Yes, those comments were made in pre-DRS times when a batsman might just ensure a pad was in the way to avoid being bowled, but there is definitely merit in the maxim.
Hussain made the point that Pope’s trigger movements can be executed a little late, thus giving rise to his being so frenetic and rushed at the start of his innings, while Butcher observed that, because of a taut front shoulder that gets in the way of his head, Pope’s weight is not far enough forward at ball release, meaning that he can get stuck on the crease as he did here. It can also mean that one’s hands become “jabby” as they cannot flow back, which has also been a problem for Pope. Push the head forward and the hands can go back.
It was not the start Pope will have wanted in his first innings as skipper — runs are still the most important part of his job — and it was a superb ball that got him but, as Boon always knew, there are some small technical matters to attend to if being bowled is not to become a bad habit.