How leadership took root
When Joe Root was 12 he won a prize coveted by every cricket-nut in Yorkshire: a trip to Headingley for a session in the indoor nets. Root and his father arrived early, in time to watch Yorkshire’s batting coach Kevin Sharp pepper the England batsman Anthony McGrath with short balls.
When McGrath finished his session, Sharp turned to Root and asked him what he wanted to do next. Root said he wanted to go through the same drill he had just seen McGrath do. Sharp demurred but Root insisted. “OK, you’ve asked for this, Joe,” Sharp said. “Just to let you know, I am not going to be your friend for the next 15 minutes.” Good as his word, Sharp then hit Root on the helmet with a bouncer. “That,” Root said, “were a good delivery.” Then he carried on batting.
Root has never been one to shy away from a challenge. And he has surely got one in front of him now. The England captaincy takes a lot out of a man, which is why Alastair Cook felt, after four years in the job, he was too exhausted to carry on. When Cook was struggling to manage the captaincy and his batting in the summer of 2014, Root (who, like so many precocious batsmen, has become a precocious autobiographer, too) wrote that, “unless you have been put in that situation, you can’t really expect to understand what it was like for him and what was going on his head”. He will find out soon enough.
Root also wrote that he did not covet the captaincy but that he enjoyed it on the odd occasions he got to do it, “through school and junior cricket with Sheffield Collegiate, when the best player tends to be given the honour, as well as regional representative sides and Yorkshire Academy”.
Unlike Cook, Root has not always been earmarked as a Future England Captain. He played for England’s Under‑19 teams but never led them. Instead the job was done by either Root’s Yorkshire team-mate Azeem Rafiq or the Warwickshire all-rounder Paul Best, who quit cricket a couple of years ago after a bad series of back injuries. Likewise, when Root played for the England Lions in 2011 and 2012, it was James Taylor who was in charge of the side.
Which is one reason why, as Root says, “my experience at senior level has remained rather limited”. The other, of course, is that he has been a regular member of the England team since he was 21, so has hardly had the chance.
Mindful of all that, one of the first decisions Andrew Strauss took when he became England’s director of cricket in 2015 was to make Root the vice-captain instead of Ian Bell. Strauss decided it was time for Root “to take more of a leadership position” because “he’s got outstanding leadership capabilities and we need him to start thinking more as a captain”.
Privately Strauss told Root that, whenever he stepped on to the field, he should try to “put himself in Cook’s shoes” and think about what he would do in the situation.
Since then Root has had a little more practice at it, for Yorkshire and England. Root led the Lions in 2013 and Yorkshire in three championship games the following year. The first of these was the famous match in which Middlesex scored 472 in the fourth innings at Lord’s, the only game Yorkshire lost that season. Which, as Root has said himself, is how he came by the nickname “Craptain”.
The other two matches, a victory against Nottinghamshire and a draw against Somerset, went better for him. Those games, along with another couple of warm-up games in Bangladesh last winter and those odd moments when Cook has been off the field, are the entirety of his captaincy experience in senior cricket.
This is one little difference between Root and the three contemporaries to whom he is often compared, Virat Kohli, 28, Steve Smith, 27, and Kane Williamson, 26. All four are captains now and England believe Root will take to it as well as the other three have done. Kohli’s batting average has increased by 26 since he took charge, Smith’s by 22, Williamson’s by six.
Root is the last of the four to lead his country and also the one with the least experience of captaincy as he does so. Kohli and Williamson both had long spells as stand-in captains of their senior limited-overs teams before they took on the job in Tests, and led their countries’ Under-19 teams too. Smith did not do that but did have stretches leading New South Wales and the Sydney Sixers in the Big Bash.
The hope is that Root will take as naturally to the captaincy as he did to Test cricket when he made his debut in 2012. He certainly looks hungry for it. If his team-mates used to tease him about the mess Yorkshire made of that match against Middlesex, lately they have been joking about how eager he has been to make his mark in those short periods he has been in charge. “From the brief periods that he’s done it he’s tried to put his stamp on things,” James Anderson said on the BBC last week. “Alastair Cook will be off the field for a bathroom break and Joe will be in there making bowling changes and all sorts of things.”
This happened during the fourth Test in Mumbai in December. When Cook stepped off the field for five minutes Root decided to bring himself on for a bowl. And he promptly dismissed both Parthiv Patel, caught behind, and Ravi Ashwin, caught at short-leg.
So, however much Root may still have to learn about how to do the job, he seems to have the three things he most needs: a lot of heart, a little luck and a good team to lead.
This is an extract taken from the Spin, the Guardian’s weekly cricket email. To subscribe just visit this page and follow the instructions.
