There are winners and losers with every England Test squad announcement, but the first one after an Ashes tour tends to feature bigger, clearer signposts for the years ahead. Ollie Pope looks to be one of the less immediately obvious casualties of the greater disloyalty Rob Key promised us.

Looking back on the piece we wrote in March about the likely beneficiaries and victims of this new policy, we pretty much got it spot on. (Broken clocks and all that.)

Jamie Smith is not out; Zak Crawley is out; Will Jacks is out; Matt Potts is now behind at least five other seamers – probably more; while Jofra Archer and Mark Wood are neither in nor out.

It’s time for some unsettling disloyalty: If England’s leaders aren’t being ejected then some of the players will be… but which ones?

We didn’t predict Sarah Taylor’s heartening promotion to the previously undervalued role of fielding coach (damn that’s a good move), but we did make a point of stating that Pope would still be out. That may have seemed redundant given he’d already been dropped from the XI midway through the Ashes, but the nature of touring meant he was still in the vicinity of the team back then. Yesterday, we got a clearer sense of where he now stands.

And where does he stand, exactly?

Earlier this year, we spent a period repeatedly falling asleep during episodes of the Star Wars series, Ahsoka. The finer points of the plot are a bit hazy, what with the whole not being conscious thing, but we’re pretty sure one of the key elements is that Grand Admiral Thrawn – an imperial leader who apparently blue himself – is stranded in another galaxy.

That’s a long way away, isn’t it? That’s not a place where you want to find yourself stranded. People casually hop about from planet to planet in Star Wars, but another galaxy? No-one wants to be a million light years from home – particularly if you’re reliant on the whims of passing space whales to get back again.

Pope is probably not in space whale territory, but he’s no longer in England’s first team and the squad tells us he’s now behind James Rew as well. Chances are he’s even further back in the queue than that.

Without going to the trouble of finding actual quotes, Key will have announced the return of Ollie Robinson by saying something along the lines of, ‘there’s always a route back into the England team, the door is never closed on anyone’ – or clichés to that effect. But what is the route for Pope now? And how long is it?

(Dis)prove yourself

The problem Pope’s got is one that many mid-career dropped players face: he’s played a lot of Test cricket. As with Crawley, that means his task is not really to prove himself, but to disprove himself. England already have a pretty good idea how Pope will perform because he’s already played 64 Tests.

Here we can draw a distinction with Crawley, because Pope has been… okay. Where Crawley’s record is standard-settingly woeful for batters who have played so many games (five hundreds in 64 Tests and an average of 31.18), Pope has made nine hundreds and averaged 34.55. He’s basically Mark Butcher.

There’s worse company to keep, but that’s also roughly the point at which Butcher’s career ended. Patience wears ever thinner at this sort of performance level and Pope can no longer make himself more appealing with a ‘youthful promise’ free gift.

However, unlike Crawley, Pope is actually up against it a bit if he wants to change people’s minds through weight of runs in first-class cricket. Crawley averages 31.49 in first-class cricket and were that number to start tracking upwards, one might reasonably assume it was the result of some meaningful improvement to his game.

But Pope is tarred by his own achievements – he has always made first-class runs. Back in 2022, when he was averaging 33 in Test cricket, Wisden reported that his non-Test first-class average was 66.42.

In other words, Ollie Pope is a man who can perform better than almost anyone in the entire history of first-class cricket and yet still play worse than Mike Gatting at Test level.

He’ll have to hope England don’t see things that way, otherwise he’s going to have to thumb for a lift off a galaxy-hopping space whale.

A modern international cricketer like Ben Duckett has a lot of tricky career decisions to make. Sometimes you don’t know whether you’ve made the right choice until you have or haven’t aged into dust.

“This certainly is the cup of The King of Kings,” says grail-hunting, Nazi-collaborating Walter Donovan, shortly before drinking from it in Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade.

After he rapidly ages and turns to dust, the ghostly Grail Knight delivers one of the finest examples – perhaps even the definitive example – of stating the bleeding obvious.

“He chose… poorly,” he intones, entirely unnecessarily.

Choices, then.

It’s easy to ridicule the Kevin Pietersen argument that young cricketers can learn so much simply by being at the IPL; that their mere presence at franchises as unused squad players somehow provides an education they couldn’t get anywhere else. But it’s not without truth. At worst, it’s a pretty good opportunity to watch how a handful of the very best players from around the world go about their business for a few weeks. It can’t be hard to pick up a few useful ideas or habits from that, can it? It’s going to give you more fresh information than watching the same old team mates you’ve grown up with, who aren’t so incredible, whose games have been shaped by roughly the same coaching you’ve had yourself.

But Alastair Cook has a point too. At some point you do need to play a bit of cricket. A load of net practice and the occasional short innings or four-over spell only really buys you Ringo Starr level rhythm. No one (other than, inexplicably, the other Beatles) is happy with that. 

County cricket can be a good place to find rhythm, but there are, of course, no guarantees. That makes the IPL v County Championship decision a pretty easy one for the lucky few faced with such a choice, because the upsides of the former are so much easier to come by.

Top tips, Ringo rhythm and a few hundred grand versus getting nicked off for 14 in your first innings followed by a groundswell of anxiety that you’ve made a dumb move that isn’t going to work out?

“Um, Top Tips please. When will the payment go into my account?”

Unusually, Ben Duckett weighed that head-to-head after a winter of scratching around, below his best, and concluded that longer hours for less money would be the right option for him this season. 

This could have resulted in crawleying around the country, racking up single figure scores and in so doing inadvertently making a compelling case for omission from England’s Test team. But that hasn’t happened. Instead, he knocked out a series of handy half centuries before cruising to 203 not out against Surrey. The Walter Donovan-esque lifelessness of the Trent Bridge pitch is irrelevant really. Duckett was seeking runs and rhythm and he has successfully completed his quest. 

The joy of The Grail Knight’s pronouncements lies in how gloriously redundant they are given what everyone around has just seen with their own eyes. (You ain’t ever gonna get one scintilla of wisdom, insight or awareness of the wider world from a crusader.) 

Sometimes things have so obviously gone well that you don’t really need a 600-word article on an independent cricket website to tell you so.

After Indy drinks from “the cup of a carpenter” and fails to rapidly age into dust, The Grail Knight unnecessarily announces, “You have chosen… wisely.”

Is it possible to bat with the conviction of Ben Duckett yet talk with the bleak defeatism of the average England fan?

England confirmed the dropping of Kent’s Zak Crawley today when James Rew walked out to open the batting for Somerset. There are definitely more straightforward ways of announcing these things.

English cricket’s rune-readers have been broadly in agreement for a while now that Zak Crawley is no longer an England Test cricketer. No-one in a position to influence things has actually come out and said so. It’s just been impossible to envisage circumstances where the managing director of England men’s team, Rob Key, can concede that they’ve, “overvalued loyalty and overvalued having a settled team,” without then dropping him.

Sure, they could drop someone else instead, but that would rather rely on Crawley making an inarguable case for retention. With 12 hundreds in 143 first-class matches and an average of 31.67, that is not a thing he was ever going to do.

It’s time for some unsettling disloyalty: If England’s leaders aren’t being ejected then some of the players will be… but which ones?

The only thing Crawley really had in his favour was that the guy England most want to pick right now – James Rew – is a middle-order batter.

We get the impression Rew likes being a middle-order batter. Why wouldn’t he? He’s scored thousands of runs there. But the vacancy is elsewhere. England love players showing ambition. They’ll have had a word. Words like ‘opportunity’ and ‘adaptability’ will have been bandied about.

‘No pressure, James, it’s entirely up to you, but from our perspective we think you’re made of the right stuff and we like players who are willing to get out of their comfort zones. We’ve got a problem and we feel like you could solve it.’

Clamour model: Can’t James Rew just carry on breathing down people’s necks for a bit?

The flipside of that is of course that staying put and churning out middle-order runs would perhaps be viewed as being inflexible and cowardly.

So today James Rew walked out to open the batting for Somerset of his own volition and got bowled for 4 in the third over. Which doesn’t mean much. He made 7 and 0 batting in the middle order last week, after all.

But it does mean something for Zak Crawley because it tells us that England are so committed to finding a new opener, they’re willing to suggest to middle-order batters that they turn themselves into top order batters to plug the gap.

Our view is that this can work, but usually doesn’t – particularly in England where the new ball is so often a capricious bitch. It didn’t work for Dan Lawrence, for example.

Joe Root performed creditably enough when he was pushed into an opening role for similar reasons – but then Joe Root’s a genius. The fact he still only lasted six Tests there underlines that one way or another it was only ever an interim measure.

Further England squad news?

So that’s one bit of implicit England Test squad news. Is the fact that Ben Stokes opened the bowling today another?

Was this a Durham decision or an England decision? And given that two of the key decision-makers would have been the England Test captain and Marcus North, the new England chief selector, how would you even tell the difference?

We suspect and hope it was just a Durham thing. Given his clanking physiology, ‘Ben Stokes, opening bowler,’ would surely be even more of a stopgap move than Rew as opener.

Now that everyone’s played four matches, the 2026 County Championship is starting to take shape. The shape it is taking is that of the 2025 County Championship.

No, really.

The top five currently looks like this.

Which isn’t really so radically different to how things finished last year.

In fact if Sussex hadn’t been handed a 12-point deduction at the start of the season, they’d be in fourth and Warwickshire would be in fifth.

That’s in-same.

People always say that county cricket is resistant to change, but this isn’t ordinarily what they mean.

How did we get/remain here?

We’ve already covered Surrey’s drawsome exploits at the Oval, so let’s take a closer look at Nottinghamshire this week. Surrey did actually win their last game, but it was cut from similarly featureless cloth (nylon?). They made 622 and failed to bowl Sussex out in the first innings after Jack Carson and Ollie Robinson made hundreds batting at nine and ten.

Has Ollie Robinson uncovered a back way into the England Test team?

Nottinghamshire have been making runs too though. They actually have the top two run-scorers in the division: Joe Clarke and Ben Slater.

On top of that, Haseeb Hameed has made a hundred (we were hoping he’d make a handful and get back into the England team), while Ben Duckett has made three fifties in three matches, which has saved him the anguish of withdrawing from the IPL only to end up with neither the money nor any runs. He’d settle for that, we reckon, given the alternative.

The wickets have been shared around a bit more because Notts are one of those counties who have access to England bowlers you’ve forgotten about.

Ben Hutton and Liam Patterson-White are the staple carbs and then the county drops in all sorts of meaty goodness alongside them. Dillon Pennington is the young up-and-comer and Josh Tongue has turned up a couple of times. Fergus O’Neill is back over from Australia again as well and seemingly still unaffected by moss or verdigris (although he did suffer a rib injury in the game he played and being subbed out meant he couldn’t play the next one).

Then last week, Olly Stone took a five-for.

Olly Stone: remember him? He was in England’s Test team less than two years ago, but hasn’t been seen much since due to his wholehearted commitment to sustaining major injuries – the mark of a true fast bowler, we always think.

Stone has now played 11 matches in four seasons at Nottinghamshire, a not-entirely-surprising volume from a man who once missed near enough two years of cricket thanks to an injury sustained celebrating a wicket.

As a substance, stone has a reputation for resilience, but perhaps you want something that offers a little more give for fast bowling.

Ollie Robinson hasn’t always seemed fully aware of what he needs to do (or not do) if he wants to play for England again. Our favourite recent quote was about how he hasn’t played for the national side since the 2024 Ranchi Test: “Apparently I fell out with the England management in India – which I didn’t realise I had.”

This might be the purest expression of the very essence of Ollie Robinson: a man who can effortlessly fall out with people and not even know that it’s happened.

You’d think he’d have a clearer view of the performance requirements, but no, not really. Earlier this season he suggested that it was up to him, “to knock the door down by taking wickets and ripping up trees.”

Well which, Ollie? It’s got to be one or the other because ripping up trees ain’t gonna do anything for the wicket-taking ability of a man with your spinal history.  

Ollie Robinson has been given a golden opportunity to develop a new ailment

Robinson has knackered his back bowling any number of times. Sometimes even the mere thought that it might be involved in some bowling later in the day has been enough for it to go. It also went during that Ranchi Test while he was batting.

This is not a body part you want to overburden. Honestly, give tree uprooting a miss, son.

Batting, of course, is rather harder to avoid – so why not make the most of it?

With England currently considering picking opening batters who aren’t actually opening batters (James Rew, Zak Crawley – people like that), Tim recently suggested in the comments that they could instead go further and revisit their Nighthawk line of thinking. Why not pick a quasi-sacrificial opener who is primarily a frontline bowler? This would allow England to bat all the way down to eight, if not quite all the way up to one.

Peak Nighthawk? Let’s not be too hasty

Ollie Robinson would be an excellent choice. Today he walked out against Surrey with Sussex 167-8 and outscored the whole top seven combined.

Robinson could definitely score runs as a Test opener. And even if he didn’t, he’d still be annoying, which is surely a worthwhile goal in itself.

Four weeks into the County Championship and most teams have only played three times. It’s therefore no surprise that four-match Warwickshire find themselves top of the table. They have achieved this after notching one win – exactly the same number as Hampshire, who are bottom.

That isn’t to say that everyone’s off the mark. Surrey, for example, have managed only draws so far having laboured fruitlessly on home pitches that make you think the ground should be renamed The Completely Flat.

Six Surrey batters are averaging over 50 so far this season. Jamie Smith’s 80.20 only gets him to third in that list.

As we’ve said before, a spinner might help. The closest thing they’ve got, Dan Lawrence, is their second-highest wicket-taker with five wickets at 57.60. It’s hard to avoid concluding that a specialist might have achieved more. We have endless time for Dan Lawrence’s bowling, but that doesn’t make him a bowler.

The three best parts of Dan Lawrence’s bowling action in escalating order of greatness

Another Surrey “spin option” boasts their best bowling average though: Ralphie Albert – Jimmy White’s grandson – a young all-rounder who took 3-80 in the only game he’s played.

You don’t get many Ralphies, do you? The only one that immediately springs to mind is Ralphie Cifaretto, the transcendentally objectionable character from the Sopranos, played by Joe Pantoliano.

Joe Pantoliano has apparently appeared in over 150 roles over the course of his career, so we presume he doesn’t always play a titanic wanker. Certainly feels that way though. (See also: The Matrix.)

Surrey host Sussex, who have been winning games, from Friday. It’s Warwickshire’s turn to take a breather this week.

England always say they want competition for places, but whenever they actually have it, everyone gets all impatient and demands that they hurry up and make the change right now. Somerset’s James Rew will wind up in England’s Test team eventually. Is there any harm in waiting for the right circumstances to unfold? We know it’s kind of gone out of fashion a bit lately, but you all remember waiting for things, right? 

The situation is this: It is increasingly obvious that James Rew is too good for county cricket, but he generally bats at number four or lower and those England places are all very filled right now. 

You’ve no doubt heard of Joe Root; and Ben Stokes is the captain; while Jamie Smith is the one person who’s scored more runs than Rew so far this season. Harry Brook lost some of his shine over the winter, but England don’t generally drop batters who average 55 in Test cricket. 

Those places are filled.

Jiggly guff

If you’ve already concluded Rew needs to be in the side and you’re hiking your way towards that destination, the awkward facts above propel you towards the timeless fallback of ‘jiggling things about a bit’.

England are going to drop a batter (Zak Crawley) and here is a batter they want to pick. This shouldn’t be a difficult equation.

But actually it is, because if you think about it for two seconds, you realise that one way or another, someone would have to take a Dan Lawrence style hit to accommodate him. 

Jacob Bethell has hit 100 per cent of his first-class hundreds batting at three for England. He had not previously been a number three, but they’ve decided he’s malleable enough to become one. You could argue that it wouldn’t be that big a difference to instead mould him into an opener, but why should he recommence the moulding process to accommodate someone else who isn’t a number three either? 

Jamie Smith could move up the order because he’s been batting at three for Surrey, but Smith doesn’t have to keep wicket for Surrey and also he was specifically picked for his ability to ramp things up when batting with the tail. 

Finally, Rew could open, but this is an unappealing option given he’s never done it before.

Clamour!

The BBC has said England have a “dilemma” here. But this isn’t a dilemma, is it? If a small Edison cap lightbulb blows and you have a bayonet bulb in the drawer, that’s not a dilemma. That’s having a spare of a different thing.

And it’s worth stating that having a spare is actually useful, because sooner or later every lightbulb blows. When the next bayonet pops, England will be delighted to have an immaculate, unsullied replacement ready to go, rather than something mangled and possibly broken because they previously tried to mash it into the wrong fitting like an impatient moron.

Conclusion

Nothing is spoiling here. James Rew is only getting better and England’s middle-order incumbents should also be driven forwards by his breath on their necks.

It’s always good to have something in the freezer.

A fortnight into the County Championship and it’s hard to weigh the performances of several England Test hopefuls. In many cases who they play for seems to have had almost as much influence on outcomes as how they’re playing.

Take, for example, Jamie Smith. This time last week we pointed out that he’d most likely already retained his Test spot with a hundred even though the worth of that hundred was tempered by being scored on a less than challenging pitch.

Skullwatch: Jamie Smith looks safe then

Last week’s featherbed now looks more like one of those thin, self-inflating camping mats after Surrey’s home game against Leicestershire, in which Smith’s first innings 166 and second innings 89 were scored either side of the visitors’ 691 all out. That’s quite a total. Perhaps Surrey might like to rethink their seasons-long spin policy of relying on either part-timers or short term imports on zero hours contracts?

The upshot is that even if Smith is the top scorer in Division 1, his average of 99 is surpassed by team-mate and theoretical rival, Ben Foakes, who is averaging 127.50 thanks to a couple of not outs. Ollie Pope’s record also has a healthy look about it with a hundred and a fifty and an average of 74. But what does any of this actually mean?

Elsewhere, Ollie Robinson’s 2026 campaign to distract England from the fact he’s a bit of a bell-end¹ by taking bucketloads of wickets appears to have got off to a solid start. His 10 wickets at 15.40 does however only put him third in Sussex’s averages behind the preposterously-named Fynn Hudson-Prentice (8 wickets at 15.25) and Henry Crocombe (13 wickets at 13.76).

These three have however helped Sussex pretty much entirely overhaul the 12-point penalty that was imposed this season after the county was forced to ask the ECB for a loan.

And finally, openers

What do you make of the situation here? Ben Duckett’s made 28 runs, while the man who was to our mind the best choice to replace Zak Crawley as his partner, Haseeb Hameed, has only made 62 runs in four innings, also for Nottinghamshire.

Crawley himself has made 60 runs in four innings in Division 2 – and really they were worth even less than that. Half of his knocks were on the same pitch where no Northamptonshire batter who came to the crease failed to reach three figures.

It’s time for some unsettling disloyalty: If England’s leaders aren’t being ejected then some of the players will be… but which ones?

Durham’s Ben McKinney was loitering in the vicinity during the Ashes and he made 244 last week. Even accounting for the reduced value of a second division run, that’s pretty handy.

One way or another, cases are being built. We’ll be able to weigh all this stuff a lot more accurately and hand down some verdicts in a few weeks time.

1. With Robinson currently out of the side and Ben Duckett having seemingly taken the hint to stop airing so much delusional madness, who is England’s current, official Bollocks-Talker In Chief? Is there a vacancy? ︎

If you’ve got a picture of an animal being conspicuously indifferent to cricket, please send it to king@kingcricket.co.uk.

Chess grandmaster and commentator, Peter Svidler, submitted this really quite magnificent photo of a black standard poodle being conspicuously indifferent to The 50 Most Ridiculous Ashes Moments, the cricket book we wrote with Dan Liebke.

It’s the demeanour that really makes this one for us, but the painting in the background adds a certain something too.

The dog in question is Joyce (who Peter explained is named after James, not Ed).

Joyce is in Russia, so this probably also qualifies for our other regular feature, Cricket Bats¹In Unusual Places.

1. And other cricket stuff. Quite rarely cricket bats, to be honest, but that’s the name of the feature now. What are we going to do? Change the URL? ︎

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Jamie Smith earned himself a mention in our previous article about which England Test players might get the boot for the next Test. We had him down as someone who’d need to play very badly in early season to lose his place, so a match-saving 132 for Surrey presumably keeps him in the team.

Things didn’t look too great for Smith in Surrey’s first innings when he was dismissed for 9 and his team-mate and England predecessor Ben Foakes then made 128.

Even if Ben Foakes is “the best wicketkeeper in the world” he’s only worth so much to England

If your county thinks another guy is a better wicketkeeper than you, there’s extra pressure to score more runs than him.

Perhaps that’s why Smith was batting at three in this match: simply to look like a more serious batter. Another interpretation is that he might be hedging his bets a bit with top order England places at even greater risk. Or maybe it’s just a Surrey thing – they have a lot of players to accommodate, after all.

It worked out for him in the second innings anyway and Dan Lawrence – another cricketer who once got suckered into batting up the order – also made a hundred.

How harshly should we judge Dan Lawrence for his fairly terrible performance as a Test opener?

Surrey’s opponents, Warwickshire, made 544, so it clearly wasn’t the most challenging pitch. Those kinds of details will be washed away by the weak shower head of time however. Come England’s next selection meeting, all that will matter is that they were probably going to stick with Smith anyway, and look, he made a hundred.

An interesting footnote to all of this is that the bare stats of Foakes’ and Smith’s innings suggest both men made efforts to alter perceptions. The former rattled along at four an over and even deigned to wallop a six at one point, whereas Smith scored at three an over and didn’t clear the ropes once, thus obliging reporters to say that he batted ‘watchfully’.

For what it’s worth, we would guess that there was zero conscious effort to play differently from either man; that those outcomes were in fact merely products of circumstance and natural variation. Ours is a world of MAKING STATEMENTS though so let’s all just pretend it was that instead.

How can you, as an England fan, possibly tolerate this world without skulls?

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