Lloyd Pope, an Australian leg-spinner playing in the Under-19 World Cup, on Tuesday took a record-breaking eight wickets in an innings in the quarter-finals against England.
The 18-year-old took 8/35 – the best figures at an U-19 World Cup – as Australia defended a rather modest total of 127, eventually bowling England out for just 96. Australia thereby reached the semi-finals at the expense of their arch rivals.
It didn’t take long before Pope was compared to the legendary Australian leg-spinner Shane Warne, even as the youngster soaked up all the adulations.
“I always love playing for my country whether I’m taking wickets or not, so going out there and doing it with some really good mates is an awesome experience,” a beaming Pope told reporters.
“I was on top of the world really today. I mean to win a quarter-final is awesome,” he added.
The 18-year-old came into the attack with England cruising at 47/0. But just as Warne had done on numerous occasions, Pope bamboozled England’s batsmen to have them all out for 96.
“I’ve always loved to bowl wrong’uns from an early age,” Pope said when asked about his lethal googly. “It’s a big part of my game and I love bowling variations and just working on new things in the nets.”
Aussie media, still smarting from the senior team’s ODI series loss to England, seized upon the red-headed tyro’s heroics in Queenstown.
“The new Shane Warne has arrived,” Pope’s home-town paper the Adelaide Advertiser trumpeted on its website.
Cricket Australia’s website cricket.com.au likened his impact to Warne’s in the 1999 World Cup, when he took four for 29 against South Africa.
Even the game’s governing body, the ICC, could not resist the comparison, saying: “This could justifiably be called a Warne-esque spell.
“This has a claim to being Australia’s most explosive scene-bursting moment since Shane lobbed one up to Mike Gatting in 1993,” it added.
Warne, the so-called “sheikh of tweak”, remains among Test cricket’s greatest wicket-takers, with 708 scalps over a stellar 15-year career. His gravity-defying delivery to Gatting announced his arrival on the world stage and has been called “the ball of the century”.
Warne himself was effusive about Pope’s performance:
With inputs from AFP
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