Pope audition offers glimpse of future while honouring the past

England's stand-in captain will stick to familiar template but has chance to stake claim

-  Ali Martin

If training has been anything to go by this week then Ollie Pope has already shown himself to be a shrewd England captain. Dan Lawrence has been performing drills for short-leg, suggesting the newbie in the lineup will be stationed in Pope's usual spot against Sri Lanka.

Essex apparently offered danger money to players plonked at boot hill in the 1980s but the best batter of the county's current crop - albeit a Surrey strutter these days will be on the same match fee as his teammates.

Maybe this is the first tactical misstep of the Pope regime. After all, he has been the one with the cat-like reflexes at short-leg the past few years; a best friend to the spinners and the quicks, forever chirping away under the lid and catching mice when they pop out. Pope has not even started the job, has performed it a handful of times for Surrey and has now moved one of the team's strengths elsewhere in the field. Perhaps alarm bells should be ringing, like the ones that briefly interrupted Sri Lanka's net session yesterday.

And so there is a first slab of analysis in what is Pope's three-Test audition to be the long-term successor to Ben Stokes as captain. Although how to assess a stand-in is not entirely straightforward given the brief.