Back where it all began, Ed Pollock is ready for his fresh start

NICK FRIEND: Once upon a time, Pollock came through Worcestershire's academy as an off-spinner, before falling out of the professional game. He found a way back at Warwickshire as a white-ball gun, but now returns to New Road with red-ball ambitions

There won't have been many moves this winter that – on the face of it – make quite so much sense as Ed Pollock's return to Worcestershire, the county whose academy he first came through.

He went to school with Ed Barnard, where Alan Richardson, the club's bowling coach, managed his football team and, even after joining Warwickshire in 2016 having taken the long, admirable road into professional cricket, continued to turn out for Barnt Green, the local team in the village where he grew up.

His arrival coincides with a period of change: Daryl Mitchell has retired, Riki Wessels has left the building, Ross Whiteley has moved south for Hampshire – a red-ball opener, a white-ball opener and a red-ball No.6. "I was like: 'Right, these are the three options that I can see myself playing,'" says Pollock, who – with New Road underwater in mid-February – has already been initiated into the unique life of a Worcestershire player.

There is an acceptance that this has come at the right time for a 26-year-old with oodles of talent and a refreshing sense of self-aware humility, as he looks back on the challenges he's faced through recent seasons. He is hardly the first cricketer to burst onto the scene as an unknown. Last month, he was chatting with Pat Brown, his new teammate, about precisely this: a pair of youngsters who took the T20 Blast by storm before anyone knew quite who they were or what they did.

What Pollock did was brutal: his strike rate was above 190 at one stage, making him the fastest-scoring T20 player on earth. He seemed a shoo-in for The Hundred, and some of his best work came in a Blast Finals Day half century against Glamorgan.

"If I look back on that, that's the key example," he says, reflecting on the difference between those halcyon early days and the more difficult times that followed more recently. Colin Ingram bowled the semi-final's first over, a match-up that played perfectly into Pollock's hands.

"Now, nobody would ever bowl a leg-spinner first-up to me. They used to bowl quite straight to me, and that just doesn't happen now either." He took Ingram for a six and a four; these days, his legside strength is no secret, so teams begin bowling off-spin instead or hiding the ball wide of off-stump, and Pollock's output suffered. He lost his Hundred contract with Manchester Originals before a ball was bowled.

"When you first come in," he explains, "you've got a brief understanding of what you're doing, and no one knows who you are."

^{Pollock made his maiden List A hundred last year for Warwickshire (Tony Marshall/Getty Images)}

He watched a similar situation unfold with Chris Benjamin last season at Warwickshire, now a former colleague and a fellow alumnus of Durham University: "Something just clicks and you roll with it for that summer. I remember Ashley Giles sitting down with me and saying it would get harder as guys work you out. It wasn't like I thought that wouldn't affect me, but it was like: 'Let's wait and see.'"

He waited and saw: "Suddenly, you're slightly out of form and then you're looking for an answer to what you're doing. At the same time, everyone now has an idea of what I'm looking to do, and it hits you."

That vicious cycle is one of the reasons for which this fresh start feels like the right thing to do. Pollock sat down before making his decision with Mark Robinson and Paul Farbrace who, for all their honesty, could give no guarantees and admitted "they weren't quite sure". There is no animosity, and it is fitting in a sense that we are talking back at Edgbaston, his former home, as part of a Blast event. In the press release confirming his departure, Farbrace waved him off as "an excellent man and a great professional".

But by his own admission, he had come to feel expendable: the first man to be dropped from Birmingham Bears' T20 line-up were he short on runs, while simultaneously adopting a dangerously gung-ho approach that hardly married up to consistency. He made two fifties in last season's competition – the most he has managed in a single campaign since his 2017 breakthrough, but hardly a compelling case.

The caveat, though, is a belief that he is better for that misadventure. "I was having a chat the other day with a coach about going full circle: I've got a much better understanding of my game than what I did.

"I see the same stats that everyone else sees, so I know exactly the plans that people are coming up with. I've seen it when you break down the strike rates into different areas and all that kind of stuff. It's a lot easier for me now; when teams do something, I know exactly what they're looking to do. It has taken time. I definitely think I'm a more rounded player than what I was before."

Part of those struggles stemmed from the challenge of quantifying success as a T20 opener, having grown up as a red-ball batter who first earned his chance at Edgbaston on the back of big runs in the longer formats: he made a Minor Counties double-hundred for Herefordshire around the same time as recording three consecutive centuries in league cricket and a second-team ton for Durham.

Going from that to T20, especially given a personal brand of uber-aggression that came naturally rather than being forced upon him, has been confusing at times. "I think people are still grappling with that," he says. "Everyone knows that in red-ball cricket, it's your average that you bank on. I think it's still shifting in T20: for a while, it was batting index, which was just strike rate and average. I was always fine with that because I was striking at 180!"

^{One of Pollock's best days came at T20 Finals Day in 2017 (Laurence Griffiths/Getty Images)}

There's a balance to be struck, of course: Sam Hain, a former teammate, is Pollock's antithesis but one of the best players in the country. "I still set my stall out to get a hundred when I went into bat in a T20," he adds, "which probably meant I always fell short of where I wanted to be.

"Finding what success is can sometimes be harder. I had some good chats with Farby about understanding how to make peace with how I get out. I don't want to sound arrogant, but if I get 50 off 20 balls, I wouldn't bat an eyelid at that because I know what I can do. That's a good day, but it's about the days when it's not quite so good; you can still get through to fifty off 35 balls."

One of his first actions at Worcestershire has been to sit down with the county's analyst to better comprehend that nuance. Rather than worrying about averages, he has started to look at balls per dismissal. "Compared to the leading white-ball openers – Hales, Bairstow, Roy – I face on average eight balls less per innings." At his scoring lick, that's at least a 10-run hole. For Pollock, how that changes is simpler than it might appear: a mental shift rather than anything necessarily technical, an appreciation that not everything has to fly to the boundary – at present, he finds the rope every 3.93 balls in T20 cricket, only without the raw numbers to match.

In six years at Edgbaston, Pollock never made a first-class appearance. In part, that is testament to the county's red-ball strength; at various points, Ian Bell, Jonathan Trott and Dom Sibley were among the competition for a spot in the top six. But it is also a legacy of how quickly Pollock became pigeonholed as a cavalier dasher who would take on the game from ball one. "I feel I'm as likely to middle my first ball as my 20th or 30th," he explains, "so I'd just go from there."

There is a determination, though, to make himself a success in four-day cricket, which means tweaking his perception as a legside slogger, while recognising that his usage by Warwickshire's first team solely in the limited-over formats at times made life harder in that regard.

"A lot of the game is just instinct," he says, "but the more I tried to find ways to hit a length ball on the top of off-stump, the more you lose the instinct to just switch over to red-ball cricket. I think that's why the best players in the world are the best players in the world. They're the guys who can switch across formats. Because it's hard.

"It took time for me in the last few years to get my head around it in terms of being able to play white-ball and still be able to play the red-ball stuff in the second team and still score runs."

^{Pollock (back centre) in his Durham MCCU days (Harry Trump/Getty Images)}

The chance to make his County Championship bow five years after his professional debut is a source of genuine excitement. Paul Pridgeon, Worcestershire's cricket chairman, is another link to Pollock's past, having coached him during his younger years. "He truly believes that he can get a lot more out of me than what's been seen so far," says Pollock, with red-ball runs chief among those thoughts.

As it stands, he jokes, only Warwickshire's second team truly know what his game looks like across four days. "It's a good question – an unknown commodity!"

In short, it will be similar in approach, if not in style, to what the county game has come to expect thus far. Conversations with the likes of Olly Hannon-Dalby and Liam Norwell, two of his former teammates and among the best seamers in the country, have reaffirmed his belief that he's on the right lines – as and when that opportunity comes.

"They said that what makes me the player I am is I'll make the bowler scared to miss. That's probably the biggest learning I've had: just because it's red-ball, I'm not going to go and leave everything. If I think I can hit the ball, I'll hit the ball. It just probably means I'm not going to try to hit a top-of-off ball over square leg. I might pat that one back for a bit!

"The game is still based on an intent to hit, it's still based on instinct. Because that is me, that's me at my best, that's what makes me hard to bowl at. It's just a bit more on the floor."

That explanation has been shaped by his experience of the last few years. "It's not like I've not played red-ball cricket," he stresses, only that circumstances meant he had "reached that stage with Warwickshire where the door was pretty shut".

"In my head, I know I can do it," he insists. That's not to say he's guaranteed a spot in Worcestershire's line-up either, with Azhar Ali also onboard to strengthen a top six headed by Jake Libby's consistency, Jack Haynes' precociousness and the new captaincy of Brett D'Oliveira.

But Pollock's background as a cricketer – released by Worcestershire at academy age, rebuilding his reputation as a triallist and forcing his way back in through that most competitive back door – is such that perhaps this means a little bit more. One June a few years back, he played cricket on 28 days, representing the second teams of Warwickshire and Durham, turning out for Herefordshire and Unicorns, returning to Barnt Green each weekend and pitching up in MCC games. "Literally, I was just driving all the time," he recalls. That month brought five centuries, its fair share of stress and, above all, an undying motivation to make it. In simple terms: "At the end of the day, I still just loved cricket."

^{Pollock is keen to play red-ball cricket at Worcestershire, having never played a first-class match for Warwickshire (Gareth Copley/Getty Images)}

It is why he so respects Jake Lintott, who has found fame and fortune belatedly via the unforgiving streets of the trialling circuit, putting himself through the ringer year upon year. Pollock gave it the season after school ended and the half-summer before he was signed. He has an economics degree as well, which theoretically has existed as a fallback option – his parents and brother are all accountants.

At the heart of this conversation, though, is an obsession with the game and a self-made commitment to making the most of the time available to him as a professional athlete. "I'll always have the opportunity to do an office job," he says, "whereas I'll only have a certain window for this. I'd always look back on the 'what ifs' if I hadn't done this."

Among his MCCU side at Durham were Cam Steel, Will Fraine, Matt Milnes and Joe Cooke, all of whom are also pros within the county game. James McCollum has played Test cricket for Ireland; Chaitanya Bishnoi has been contracted to Chennai Super Kings; Charlie Macdonell – not in a professional setup – churned out centuries against Derbyshire and Warwickshire during their first-class encounters, and it is Pollock's greatest surprise that he has not kicked on. As a group, they might not have known it then, but they were spurring on one another for this next phase. Pollock admits: "If it hadn't been for Durham, I don't think I'd be playing professional cricket."

That reflection comes from where his game was at post-school: "I wasn't kept on after the academy because my bowling was junk." He was an off-spinning allrounder when Worcestershire let him go, and in the years leading up to that point he had performed every position possible, including as wicketkeeper at under-12 level.

So, there is plenty of pride in ending up here, back where he began but in the role he always saw for himself.

"I do think there is something in the fact that I was in it, saw what it was like and then was out of it and had to work hard to get back into it," he says, smiling. "It makes me appreciate how much I want it."