Ollie Pope disappointed as Test summer sweep slips away

England's stand-in captain, Ollie Pope, expressed his team's disappointment at falling short of making history in the final Test of the English summer. However, Pope refuted any claims of complacency being the reason behind their surprising eight-wicket defeat against Sri Lanka at the Kia Oval.

Leading 2-0 in this series, and following on from their 3-0 victory over West Indies in July, England had been on course for their first summer's clean sweep since Michael Vaughan's team won seven out of seven in 2004 while Ben Duckett and Pope himself, with his seventh Test hundred, were rattling along to 221 for 3 on a truncated first day's play.

But thereafter the wheels came off for England's batting, with a first-innings collapse of 7 for 64 giving way to a second-innings total of 156 in 34 overs, with only Jamie Smith's counterattacking half-century offering any meaningful resistance. It meant that a handy first-innings lead of 62 was swallowed up in an eventual victory target of 219, and Pathum Nissanka wasted no time in beating England at their own game, sealing the chase in style with his rollicking innings of 127 not out from 124 balls.

"Of course, we want to be a team that wins every game, as everyone does, and it's been 20 years since we've done it," Pope said at the close. "That was an extra bit of motivation this week, so there's that slight bit of frustration that we've not done that. But at the same time, at the start of the summer, had someone said we're going to win five out of six Test matches, you probably would have taken it as well."

Related

Pope passes character test to dispel captaincy clouds

Ollie Pope is a potential weak link for England at No. 3

Pathum Nissanka, fast bowlers script famous win for Sri Lanka

England's most profligate day under McCullum hints at a team who are coasting

England had talked about the "refinement" of their aggressive approach in the early Tests of the summer, but the manner of this defeat was a throwback to other avoidable losses in the Bazball era - notably at Wellington and Lord's in 2023, when on each occasion their failure to close out a dominant position was a big factor in their failure to win each series.

England lost each of their first 13 wickets of the match to attacking strokes, including Pope for 7 in his second innings, and were then derailed by a superb display of left-arm swing bowling from Vishwa Fernando, whose consecutive lbws against Joe Root and Harry Brook tore the guts out of England's middle-order.

Brook's performance came in for scrutiny, particularly in light of Michael Vaughan's warning on the BBC that he would get his comeuppance if he continued to disrespect the rhythms of Test-match batting, as had appeared to be the case in his sketchy first innings of 19. Vishwa had his number second-time around, but Pope insisted that a "lack of hunger" had not been the cause of his downfall.

"With guys like Harry Brook and Joe Root, they will never, ever get bored of batting," Pope said. "I know, from the outside, it might look like that, but they're guys that want to go and put together hundreds every game. So I wouldn't say it's a lack of an edge, or not really having that desire to go and put together a massive score, but it can just happen in cricket, and it's been a good gap since we last did that."

Englands batting on day three let Sri Lanka back in

•

Glyn Kirk/AFP/Getty Images

The loss was Pope's first of his interim captaincy career, and while it did not affect the result of the series, it did leave England with a somewhat awkward scenario at the trophy lift, when their debutant Josh Hull (P1 L1) was summoned to do the honours alongside his captain, much as Ben Stokes had invited Gus Atkinson and Jamie Smith to do likewise after their winning contributions to the earlier West Indies series.

Perhaps that gesture was intended as an apology to Hull, whose six wicketless overs were picked off at more than a run a ball in the chase, for Pope had no doubts where the blame for England's defeat lay.

"Probably day three," he said. "Obviously, we were ahead of the game after two days and weren't able to capitalise on a decent first-innings lead. With the bat we weren't good enough yesterday, but credit to Sri Lanka. They bowled well, they made some good adjustments in the second innings, and we weren't up to it, which can happen.

"We've been fairly solid overall as a batting unit this summer, and unfortunately we weren't at our best yesterday. It should have been a game that we drove forward, and we were in the commanding seat there. But, obviously, getting bowled out for 140 on a pitch that generally gets better and better as the game goes on was probably the main reason why we weren't on the right side of the result."

The killer blow to England's hopes, however, was Root's dismissal for 12 to an inswinging yorker from Vishwa. Sri Lanka had talked at length about their tactics since the end of the Lord's Test - in which Root's twin hundreds had put the series out of reach - and as Sanath Jayasuriya, their interim coach, said afterwards, their plans had come together perfectly.

"Some of the things we talked about was to bowl a really good short one against him, and also to bowl great yorkers," Jayasuriya said. "I think we did both very well in both innings. Yesterday the ball started to swing for Vishwa, and he tried that. Joe Root is the batter who changes the match in that team. The other batters score runs around him. That was a big wicket."