Geoffrey Boycott shows no mercy on Ollie Pope, tears into England’s No. 3: ‘He’s a lost cause'

Geoffrey Boycott criticizes Ollie Pope's performance after England's Ashes loss, claiming he is stuck in a cycle of poor decision-making.

Geoffrey Boycott has trained his sights on Ollie Pope after England’s latest Ashes stumble. In his coloumn in The Telegraph, he has argued that sentiment and potential can no longer shield a batter he believes is stuck in a loop of self-inflicted exits. He framed Adelaide as another reminder that Test cricket punishes looseness, especially in Australia, where one soft dismissal can swing a session, then a match, and then the series very quickly.

Ollie Pope walks from the field after he was dismissed during play on day four of the third Ashes Test.(AP)

With England 3-0 down after their 82-run defeat in Adelaide, Boycott called for hard decisions and named Pope among the players who, in his view, have earned scrutiny through repeated underperformance: “Ollie Pope is a lost cause because he never learns,” Boycott wrote. “I think he would give his wicket away if he were playing in a county second XI. He can’t help himself as he finds ways to get out that I couldn’t dream up. Somewhere in his head, there is a self-destruction button.”

Pope's miseries keep increasing

The bluntness is familiar from Boycott, but the target is pointed. Pope arrived on this tour already under pressure, having been replaced as vice-captain by Harry Brook. Since then, his numbers have offered little refuge: 125 runs in six innings in the series, at an average of 20.83, with Australia’s bowlers repeatedly drawing him into a kind of shot selection Boycott describes as avoidable.

For Geoffrey Boycott, the larger concern is that the mistakes feel structural rather than incidental, a pattern he suggests has survived experience, coaching, and opportunity. Pope has now played 64 Tests, scoring 3,732 runs at an average of 34.55 with nine centuries and 16 half-centuries, but his returns against Australia remain stark: 282 runs in 16 innings at 17.62, without a single fifty.

Those numbers sharpen the question England’s management has tried to postpone: Is Ollie Pope a long-term number three who will eventually settle, or a talented player whose decision-making erodes the very gifts that got him there? Boycott’s answer is unambiguous, and, in the abrasive cadence of his writing, deliberately impatient.

England’s top order has been a running theme of the tour’s collapse, and Boycott’s criticism extends beyond Pope. Yet the Pope passage cuts deepest because it frames the issue as compulsion: an inability to sell a wicket, to recognise moments, to resist the urge to manufacture risk when survival is the first currency of Test cricket.

Whether England act on that advice is another matter. Dropping Pope mid-series would be a major call; persisting would be a statement that the long view still matters, even as the urn slips further out of reach. What Boycott has done, though, is strip away the polite language. In his world, learning is the job, and Pope, he argues, has stopped doing it.