Root smiled at my best bouncer when he was just 12
Peter Hayter talks to the coach who helped develop Joe Root’s prodigious talent as a lad at Yorkshire
Although Sharp left Headingley when the club restructured their coaching department in 2011, the two men have stayed close ever since, each step on Root’s career path cheered then reviewed by his mentor.
When Root suffered the loss of form that cost him his place during his first Ashes tour, in 2013-14, it was Sharp he turned to, to ask, ‘have you seen anything?’, to be advised to think about concentrating on his strengths rather than trying to fix his weaknesses.
“He was spending so much energy worrying about his weaker areas that he forgot what to do when the ball was there to be hit,” Sharp explains.
He has no qualms whatsoever about Root’s ability to thrive under the extra pressure of captaincy. “He’s aways found a way, always been preparing for the next step and he’s always kept his sense of fun. He’s ready.”
This summer, when Root takes the field at Lord’s for the first time as Test captain, Sharp will be there, finally holding England’s new leader to a long-standing promise to leave him two tickets on the gate when he made it into the team.
And on that morning, the first of the first Test against South Africa, on July 6, Sharp admits he will not only be looking at what Root has become, but also recalling memories of what he was when he first saw him, a precious 12-year-old heading to the top.
“And he’ll be the same,” Sharp reflects, “smiling, nodding and saying to himself, ‘it’s great out here, isn’t it?’”
The coach Joe Root credits for helping him become one of the world’s best batsmen claims he was pretty sure he would be that good the first time he clapped eyes on him. Given that England’s new Test captain was 12-years-old at the time and looked even younger, some might suggest that Kevin Sharp, then Yorkshire’s batting coach, was either possessed of clairvoyant powers or a loose grip on reality.
Yet listening to Sharp tell the full story of their first encounter, you realise the current Worcestershire batting and 2nd XI coach had good cause to believe the Milky Bar Kid was destined for the very top.
“It’s not often you get that feeling,” explains Sharp with considerable understatement, “but I did that day.
“He was a tiny kid with an angelic look. All his gear looked too big for him. But after one half-hour session – the way he played, the way he spoke and the way he was – I was thinking in terms of England straight away.”
The main reason being that this was no ordinary net session. In fact, according to Sharp, it turned out to be “surreal”. Root had been invited to Headingley as part of the club’s scholarship scheme for promising youngsters, the highlight of the day being a chance to meet the first team’s specialist batting coach for a chat and a hit.
Sharp was adept at putting at their ease all those young lads quaking in their trainers. In Root’s case he soon realised those skills would not be necessary.
“It was remarkable,” Sharp says. “Working with the pro staff I didn’t know Joe at all, but he had been recommended by the junior coaches. He was due to come to the nets at 5pm that day but arrived early and sat at the back, watching me putting Anthony McGrath through some intensive work against short-pitched stuff, really throwing the ball at him hard, wanging it in from about eight yards as fast as I could.
“Down came this smiling kid and I recall thinking, as we started to chat, something quite strange is going on. Here was this 12-year-old kid talking me through his game, his strengths and lesser strengths, what he was good at and what not so good at, what he needed to work on – I can do this, but not that – and I’m thinking ‘what’s bloody going on?’
“I’d never heard anything like it. It could have been a 25-year-old talking. His maturity and cricket knowledge blew me away and I remember sitting there thinking, ‘If you can play as well as you can talk you’re going to be good’.
“I say, ‘Right, Joe, we’ve half an hour, do you want to go down on the shop floor and do anything?’
“He smiles and says, ‘Yes, please’, then looks me straight in the eye and says, very politely, ‘I want the same session as Anthony McGrath just had’.
“I say, ‘I can’t do that, I’ll hurt you’. He says, ‘No, I’ll be all right’.
“I probably shouldn’t have done it but I said, ‘Ok, right, get all your kit on – helmet, chest guard, arm guard, thigh guard, everything you’ve got because I’m coming for you’.
“So off he toddles, with his pads too big, waddling down to the stumps. I set a field – three slips, a gully, a man in front, and I say, ‘Joe, you asked for this’.
“And he nods and smiles and says, ‘Yes, that’s fine’.
“So I run in with the new ball and pitch it up and he leaves it, leaves it, defends it, judges line and length beautifully and I’m thinking, ‘he can play as well’ and, before I know it, a little voice on one shoulder is saying, ‘go on, bowl him a bouncer’.
“Then the other voice joins in. ‘No, you can’t do that. What if you hit him on the head and knock him out?’
“Getting sacked for finishing off a 12-year-old would not have been great on the cv. Then the first voice says, ‘No, go on, let him have one’.
“I’m thinking he’s played everything else so easily, so I did.. I let him have this bouncer and it was a beauty. It just followed him and, as he rocked back, it clipped his grille. And I followed through eyeball-to-eyeball and he just nodded at me and said, ‘Ooh, that were a good ball, weren’t it?’”
The next time Root requested similar treatment, on the club’s pre-season trip to Barbados, he had reached the grand old age of 18, but, as Sharp had now come to learn, as with everything they had worked on during their time together, his main purpose was to prepare himself to bat for his country.
Root, by now, had grown into a body that, because of an earlier spurt, had been conspiring against his footwork and timing.
But he was still a year away from making his Yorkshire debut, when, not picked for the county’s match at the Three Ws Oval on the University campus, he asked Sharp to accompany him to the concrete-floored and not brilliantly-lit indoor school, armed with a new ball and announced: “We’re going to play Test cricket for 20 minutes.
“Your only job,” Root told his coach, “is to run in as hard as you can and throw the ball as fast as you can and hit me on the head.”
“I did,” says Sharp. “I hit him on the head; I hit him in the chest. I hit him in the throat and I hit him in the neck. Every time he took another blow, he nodded and smiled and said, ‘That’s fine’.
“Just like that session when he was 12, I set a virtual field with slips and close catchers but when the ball hit the bat or the gloves it always went down on the floor, never looped up in the air.
“At the end of it I said, ‘Right, Joe, I’ve done what you asked me to do and I’ve hit you everywhere’.
“And he said, ‘Yeah, you did, didn’t you? But you didn’t get me out, did you?’
He was a tiny kid with an angelic look. All his gear looked too big for him. But after one session I was thinking in terms of England