It is hard to remember when an England batsman has exhibited such silky skills executed in as simple and uncomplicated a manner as Joe Root is doing now. England have had some wonderful batsmen in recent times, from Alastair Cook, back through Kevin Pietersen, Jonathan Trott, Andrew Strauss, Ian Bell, Michael Vaughan and Marcus Trescothick, and so on. Perhaps we need to go back to David Gower at his best to see anyone wearing the crown and three lions bat so effortlessly and with style.
Root and Steve Smith are jostling around at the top of the ICC rankings, along with Virat Kohli and Kane Williamson, a quartet of wondrously talented players, but it is hard to imagine anyone can bat with any higher degree of perfection than Root exhibited for his 325 runs at Old Trafford. At the moment Root has taken his career average to a shade over 56, which places him seventh in an all-time list of England batsmen, and the best since Ken Barrington – whose own monumental score in Manchester Root was two runs shy of matching – retired in 1968 with an average of 58.67.
Another 150 runs in the next Test at Edgbaston, even for twice out, would see him overtake Sir Leonard Hutton, and for a Yorkshireman there could be no finer accolade than that. Of current Test batsmen, only Smith, 60.62, and Adam Voges, an unlikely 95.5, but a player in his 16th Test only, are above him.
How to bowl to someone who has elevated his game to such heights? The easy answer is to get him off strike and have a go at someone else. Cook is relentless, unwavering in his desire to occupy the crease, but if you don’t feed his cut and avoid half-volleys on his legs, a bowler can at least keep things relatively in check. He is just hard to get out.
Root, though, is different. From what looks like an off-stump guard, on which he places his bat, his initial strength is on the back foot, from which he can stand tall, up on his toes and even off the ground, to power the ball away with a vertical bat through the off-side. Few players can do that by getting over the ball rather than swaying away to allow themselves room to carve with a crooked blade. But then when bowlers are consequently compelled to pitch further up, he drives, on both sides of the wicket, clean through extra cover, and brutal through midwicket, which he works with a turn of the wrist only: Root does not hit across the line. He can pull and hook with a roll of the wrist to keep the ball down, sweeps the spinners in orthodox and reverse fashion, and hits judiciously and powerfully over the top.
The scoreboard ticks over merrily when he is at the crease, which, as Cook freely admits, allows the England captain and others to go at their own natural, often more pedestrian pace without recourse to playing out of a comfort zone. In this form, bowling to Root once he is established is damage limitation first and foremost, as borne out by the manner in which he sees reaching a century as merely a marker on the road to somewhere else: his 10 Test centuries are 104, 180, 200*, 154*, 149*, 182*, 134, 130, 110, 254. Once in, he tends to be there for the duration.
There can be no greater illustration of his absolute determination to succeed, and elevate his game to new levels than the manner in which he absorbed the lessons to be learned from the manner of his dismissals at Lord’s (and those of others) and, in the space of a few days managed to carry them out. This takes not just technical skill but mental strength.
In the first innings at Lord’s, playing fluently, he miscued a slog-sweep against Yasir Shah and was caught from the subsequent skier. In the second, a fairly modest bouncer was pulled straight to a fielder placed precisely for the shot, a transparent set-up for which he fell. He took on board how Yasir targets the stumps and pads, inviting batsmen, when he pitches deliberately short, to cut or hit across the line, rather than recognise the bowler’s skill in hurrying the delivery on.
Every time he makes a mistake, Root said, he gets punished for it, which is, of course, the nature of the game. The solution is not to make the same mistakes. So he played straight, let the bowler field the defensive shots himself, and scored when the bowler attacked other areas in his search for wickets. Pare it down like that and the game sounds and looks simple but it is the work that goes into it behind the scenes which makes it seem so.
His elevation to No3 has been a triumph, a move that has been argued for a while now. Those against it saw his success at No4 and could see no reason to upset that. The counter-argument, though, is that there is no one better qualified to face the vagaries that come in that position – virtual opener one day, middle-order dilettante the next – than your best player. The reassurance of Trott striding out to bat was incalculable. Now with England, rather than protect Root, they are allowing him to set the standards. How appetising to think that the best may be yet to come.
