Ollie Pope doesn’t want to be Ben Stokes: Chris Woakes

England captain Ben Stokes has been ruled out of the ongoing series against Sri Lanka due to a hamstring injury. Ollie Pope has replaced him at the helm of things and under his captaincy, England have managed a positive start, restricting the visitors to 236 runs in the first innings. With the bat, the Three Lions posted 22/0 on Day 1 and are trailing by 214 runs.

Veteran England all-rounder Chris Woakes was impressed with Pope’s first day in charge and stated that he wants to do his own thing and build his reputation and does not want to follow in the footsteps of Stokes. Woakes mentioned that Pope was calm and was communicating well with all the bowlers about the field changes and that he seemed like a natural successor of Stokes.

“He's been good. He doesn't want to be Ben, he wants to do it his own way which is great. He does a really good role as vice-captain when he's out there with Ben and they're constantly talking,” Woakes told Sky Sports.

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“He'll probably naturally pick up on what Ben does, but I wouldn't say he was any different. He was just himself. He was certainly on it, trying to communicate with his bowlers, talk about fields, but also pretty chilled which was great,” he added.

Woakes stated to have enjoyed the opening day of the series but believes that the team should have bowled them out earlier. Sri Lanka were 6/3 at one stage and later 113/7 at another but yet, but England couldn't restrict them below 150 runs. Milan Rathnayake played a charismatic knock of 72 runs, which bailed Sri Lanka out of trouble. 

Explaining their average performance with the ball towards the end, Woakes mentioned that bad light played a part as they could not bring in the pacers to clear the tail.

“I think it's a good day. When you bowl on day one on a Test surface like that, to be batting at the end of the day I think you're really happy. It would have been nice to bowl them out earlier than what they got, but with the bad light we couldn't bring our quick guys on to mop up the tail,” Woakes said.