MULTAN: England’s stand-in skipper Ollie Pope hailed the fitness and determination of his team on Friday after they crushed Pakistan by an innings despite conceding 556 runs, singling out batsmen Harry Brook and Joe Root for scripting the historic win.
“I think credit to firstly, the bowlers, the way they went about their stuff on day one and the majority of day two,” Pope said at the post-match presentation.
“The fitness that they showed ... and then the same with Harry and Joe. We knew the way to win this game was to put a mammoth score on the board.
“And it wasn’t just 100 obviously ... I think that’s just credit to them, (not just) for the skills they’ve got with the bat but (also) the determination they had to put the team in a winning position. So it was awesome.”
Pope sympathised with Pakistan, who fell to their sixth straight loss and have not won a Test at home since 2021.
“Obviously when you bat and make 550, you think you’re in the driving seat there,” Pope said. “But when you come out to bat again, and you’re 260 runs behind, and the pitch is three days older than it was when you first batted, it’s never an easy thing to do.
“We felt like we had a lot of different wicket-taking opportunities. The odd ball was staying low, we got the ball reversing a little bit, and got the odd ball to spin as well. It’s never an easy position.
“Even if you bat as well as you can and make 400 in that last innings, we still would have tried to back ourselves and chase 140 or so.” The only bitter pill for Pope in a game where the runs flowed freely was his two-ball duck.
“I mean, that’s the game, isn’t it? I smoked a pull shot straight to mid-wicket and, unfortunately, I was the one to miss out this week. But it’s a team game and what matters is that we’re on the right side,” he said.
The win is England’s fourth consecutive Test triumph on Pakistan soil, after a 3-0 whitewash two years ago. England had only won two away Tests against Pakistan in the previous 61 years.
Pope, who is standing in as captain for the injured Ben Stokes, said for him it was “one of the top four wins.”
“This win would be right up there,” said Pope who also led England in a 2-1 win over Sri Lanka last month.
“I can think of Islamabad (Rawalpindi against Pakistan in 2022), Hyderabad (against India this year) and Trent Bridge (against New Zealand in 2022)... and this is right up there with the rest of them too.”
Pope lauded Brook and Root for setting up the mammoth total.
“Credit to those two Yorkshiremen yesterday,” said Pope of the pair who hail from the northern England county. “In another situation, you’d play a few more shots once you’re past your hundred naturally, but they knew how important it was to get us up to that massive score, so credit to them.”
Published in Dawn, October 12th, 2024
