As Joe Root and Ben Stokes punched and clipped their way towards a recuperative century stand on a heavy, woozy afternoon at Lord’s it was, as ever, easy to forget the presence of pretty much anything else beyond those high Victorian garden walls. There were gurgles of pleasure around the basking bleachers; a parade of triumphantly bared male lower-leg beneath pleated chino shorts in the garden behind the pavilion; and everywhere the standard, quietly fevered consumption of jugs, pints and flutes.
It was, though, simply a prelude to the main action, a genuinely startling innings from Root that decorated the opening day of the Test summer with an effortless, assertive grace and provided the opening act of his captaincy with a suitably storybook centrepiece.
By the end of the day, with Moeen Ali settled and producing some exhilarating shot-making of his own, Root was finding deeper gears, a binding captain’s knock transformed into a genuinely outstanding innings of 184 not out in England’s score of 357 for five as Lord’s luxuriated in the full range of his talent.
Three figures had arrived on the stroke of 4.30 with a nifty little paddle off the left-arm spinner, Keshav Maharaj. At that stage it was an orderly, officer-class hundred from 150 balls with 15 fours. Root waved with a burst of pent-up joy towards the England balcony as the stands rang with cheers and Root-hoots, rising to a new pitch of pleasure shortly afterwards as he stepped out for the first time and hit Maharaj in a wonderful, easy arc over mid-off into the lowest tier of the pavilion
England’s Test captaincy tends to have an energising effect on its standard-bearer, albeit history suggests this is often followed by a steady frazzling of the senses. Perhaps Root will be different. He is an unmarked kind of cricketer, free from any existing scar tissue, and with an unusual air of vigour and straight‑line positivity about him.
Not that he had everything his own way. An unusually unprepossessing England top-order had struggled in the morning against Vernon Philander, who had bowled beautifully, albeit predictably, Philandering his way in from first the Nursery End then the Pavilion, landing it on a Philandering length with just enough Philander both ways to reduce England to a perilous 82 for four at lunch.
The selection of Gary Ballance as England’s new No3 had looked odd before the match. It was no less odd by the end of the day. Root is correct to peg his power base out around players he knows and trusts. The new captain had announced that his Yorkshire team-mate was “a different player” this season and those who watch Ballance regularly say he has been far more assertive in his footwork.
He wasn’t here, though, playing with a serene impermanence for his 20 runs and still producing a bizarrely pronounced step back and across as the bowler gathers, lining up his pad in front of his stumps like a bullseye. Ballance is playing forward when he moves like this. But it’s faux-forward, a forward from so far back in his crease it’s not forward at all. Morne Morkel duly thudded one into that pad and Ballance was gone. He has 97 runs in his past eight Test innings and will feel he needs to show something in the second dig here.
Root was a little scratchy early on, getting off the mark in Kagiso Rabada’s first over with a flashing uppercut over second slip. Half an hour before lunch his third angsty boundary of the morning arrived as he cut the ball though gully’s hands, having previously hooked just over the head of fine-leg.
At which point Root began to assert himself, gaining some traction alongside Stokes, his vice-captain, and finding his more settled back-foot rhythms, with a snap to his shots and a familiar swaying grace to his movements. An increasingly serene fifty came up shortly after lunch from 89 balls.
At 135 for four there was a breathtaking little push through cover, Root opening the bat-face enough to find the gap and send the ball speeding away from Temba Bavuma at startling speed, a moment that proved the spark for that fine, accelerating partnership of 114 with Stokes.
Captaincy aside, there was another kind of progress here for England’s gun batsman of the past three years. Root is so routinely bundled in with the Smith-Kohli-Williamson power base that it is easy to overlook where he has fallen slightly short. This is an A-list cricketer who still hasn’t quite explored the outer limits of his own talent, often failing to push on when he’s in. Root has been out 16 times in Tests between 71 and 99. Steve Smith, the current gold standard, has played the same number of matches and been out seven times in the same spread, racking up 10 more hundreds.
Conversion, pushing on, scaling the highest slopes of his own brilliance: this is the final frontier for Root. Here, he pushed for the summit with soft hands, angling Maharaj away off the back foot and twice running Rabada down to third man to move to 96.
This is the first stage of the first step. But Root was brilliant, first holding the innings together, then decorating it, then finally dominating. Whatever the future brings there won’t be many better days than this.
