Pope can take chance to cement place at top of the list to succeed Stokes

Ollie can silence critics in skipper's absence for Test series against Sri Lanka

- Malik Ouzia

AFTER 26 matches and more than two years, for the first time under the Ben Stokes and Brendon McCullum partnership, England will tomorrow start a Test without the former on the field.

It is, let us be honest, a small miracle that it has taken this long. For much of that period, it seemed Stokes's chronic knee issue was a ticking time bomb on his Test career, and so that his sidelining now is through a torn hamstring feels both particularly cruel and oddly reassuring; it is hard to pull one of those if you can barely move.

That the injury happened in the Hundred, just as it might have anywhere, has prompted predictable outrage, but the upshot now is that the absences of both Stokes and another Bazball ever-present in opener Zak Crawley have added a layer of intrigue to the three-match series against Sri Lanka, which begins at Old Trafford tomorrow morning.