This is Root’s team now
NASSER HUSSAIN’S VERDICT ON ENGLAND’S TEST WIN IN SOUTH AFRICA,
Remember The Cursed Tour? When england lost the first Test and a whole team to flu and sickness bugs over Christmas and the New Year? Then when rory burns put himself out for three months playing football and Jimmy Anderson and Jack Leach followed him home?
Well, a tour of South Africa that once seemed to be heading for disaster and the possible end of Joe root’s captaincy now seems destined to be remembered fondly as the birth of the skipper’s new, young, vibrant england.
Certainly, england’s first victory by an innings in an overseas Test since the famous series-clinching win in Sydney in early 2011 feels like the start of something, a stepping stone towards the bigger targets of the next Ashes and the top of the Test rankings.
It has not yet won them this series. but with South Africa looking broken and their captain Faf du Plessis admitting yesterday the final Test in Johannesburg will be his last at home, it will take something extraordinary to deny england a 3-1 win now.
We have, of course, been here before. It wasn’t much more than a year ago that root’s england were playing ‘total cricket’ and winning 3-0 in Sri Lanka. It looked as though they had cracked it. Then they went throughout 2019 without a Test series victory. but this transformation of policy under new coach Chris Silverwood, with more versatile players being replaced by specialists and round pegs being fitted into round holes, seems to be built on more solid foundations.
‘We’ve got a really clear way of trying to play,’ said root after Keshav maharaj had delayed the inevitable yesterday by smashing three sixes in his 71 before england wrapped up an innings and 53-run victory on the stroke of lunch. ‘everyone knows what their role is within the side and it’s about making sure when you get your opportunity to affect the game, you go and do it. We’ve executed that brilliantly in the last two games. We’re by no means the finished article but we’re moving in the right direction now.’
And they are moving in the right direction with youth at their core, most notably here in the form of player of the match Ollie Pope, who looked like england’s best emerging Test batsman and their first potentially great one since, well, Joe root.
‘I think he’s a wonderful player, I really do,’ said root as Pope sat alongside him. ‘ He’s smart, he reads the game well and I couldn’t be more pleased that he’s sat here with a hundred under his belt already. He’s more than capable of breaking records for england.’
A transformation in england’s policy, then, and in the direction of this series, with all South Africa’s optimism after victory in the first Test under the new management of Graeme Smith and mark boucher being replaced by despondency and desperation.
They did go down fighting yesterday but a last-wicket stand of 99 between maharaj and Dane Paterson came only when the pressure was off and merely served to emphasise just how woeful South Africa’s batting had been before then.
At least they stopped root recording his first five-wicket haul in Tests, with the captain over-bowling himself until he was smashed for a world- record equalling 28 in a single Test over here. And South Africa, with Du Plessis struggling to defend both himself and his team yesterday, will be without the controversially suspended Kagiso rabada on Friday on a home pitch that would have been made for him.
‘I’m not a robot and I’m trying to find ways to make myself as strong as possible,’ said Du Plessis, who is likely to hand over the one-day captaincy to Quinton de Kock but wants to carry on playing until after the Twenty20 World Cup in October. ‘I still have a huge role as captain to make sure I lift these guys to win the next game.’
england and root’s challenge is to make sure they do not and go on themselves to complete a job they have so impressively started in the last two potentially game-changing Tests.