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This Ashes could spell the end for one Bazball stalwart
The Independent
|December 21, 2025
The Clapham boys are finally parting ways. Zak Crawley and Ollie Pope have been bound at the hip for years. Born a month apart, the pair have been cut from the same privately educated cloth.
The two prodigies who captained their school teams against each other played the same national age-group competitions together and scaled the heights of international cricket together.
The journey ended in Adelaide. Crawley made 85. An innings where he batted as well as he ever has in an England shirt. He was on one run off 27 balls, but was calm. Driving when the opportunity arose, pulling powerfully in front of square also.
“Good players pull the ball square of the wicket,” Graeme Swann said on TNT Sports. “Great players pull it in front of square. That’s the best I’ve seen him play.”
Pope, on the other hand, arrived needing a miracle in the city of churches. Since his dismissal in the first innings at Perth, he has looked like a tortured soul. A pre-match press conference in Brisbane spoke to a muddled mind where he gave a 200-word word salad answer to what England’s approach is with the bat that concluded with, “it’s just about having that complete clarity”.
Right.
This story is from the December 21, 2025 edition of The Independent.
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