Pope's divine intervention justifies the 'new Warne' tag

Lloyd Pope, destroyer of England, wasn't always a leg-spinner. "When I was younger I used to roll out a few mediums, Under 12s sort of stuff," he said. "It took a while. I didn't really like doing it [bowling leg spin] at the start, and then I got a lot of encouragement and it grew from there and I started liking it more and more."

He can rarely have liked it more than today after his magnificent spell routed England for 96 and helped Australia defend 127.

Expect the puns to flow: ‘The infallible Pope brings Australian salvation’. ‘England’s hopes go up in (white) smoke as Pope is anointed Warne’s successor’. We’d be riffing on ‘seven deadly spins’ and ‘seventh heaven’ too if he hadn’t gone and taken eight, 8-35 to be precise, the best figures in an ICC Under 19 Cricket World Cup.

In just under 10 overs of magnificent leg-spin bowling, Lloyd Pope’s life has surely changed forever. No longer one of a 15-strong squad of Under 19 cricketers, he is ‘the next Warne’, a poisoned chalice for many Australian leg-spinners, who have struggled to live up to the billing – how could they?

In this case however, and not just for the rip, the accuracy, and the variations, but for the perfect timing and sense of a moment this could justifiably be called a Warne-esque spell; this has a claim to being Australia’s most explosive scene-bursting moment since Shane lobed one up to Mike Gatting in 1993. And of course, it had to come against England.