Root and Paine facing defining moments
Rival captains suffering intense scrutiny of their tactical know-how as well as sleepless nights
At the toss to launch the fourth Test, match referee Javagal Srinath will oversee the two blazered captains to make sure neither gets up to any hanky-panky, like one picking up the coin before the other has seen how it has fallen – worth a lot if either has bookmaking friends in Mumbai.
But match referees would never have been needed in the first place if all Test captains had been so clean-limbed and wholesome as England’s Joe Root and Australia’s Tim Paine.
Both will have their reputation – their place in history – determined over the course of the next fortnight. At best, Root will add his first Ashes series as the winning captain to his World Cup
winner’s medal; at worst, he will become one of the few England captains to be beaten in Ashes series home and away. Paine’s goal is to become the first Australian captain to win an Ashes series in England since 2001, and thereby crown Australia’s renaissance.
Both men were patient and composed when they gave their eve-of-test press conferences, Root weighing up each word as if it were a ball he was facing, Paine as if he were catching it behind the wicket. Both were thoroughly civil when they mentioned opponents. Neither could be accused of being a tub-thumper or rabble-rouser: if either man were a Hyde Park orator, Paine might attract a few more passers-by for having a slightly stronger voice.
Paine, being Tasmanian, has escaped the fiercest of Australian suns and, though six years older than Root’s 28, could pass for younger: the Englishman’s brow is more furrowed. Root grows fashionable stubble, whereas Paine is clean shaven. It was partly for this wholesome cut of his jib that Paine was chosen to lead Australia after the crisis of Sandpapergate, while Root – as the heir to Sir Alastair Cook – inherited his core values of modesty and decency. Another cause of Root looking older than his counterpart might be that he used to smoke, although the moral turpitude of Root’s youth probably went no further than that and perhaps once saying to a beggar “no, I’m sorry”.
Both men laughed during their press conferences. Root once lapsed into the boyish grin of the practical joker he was before being elevated to the Test captaincy, while Paine made a humorous quip when asked to comment about the overnight news of Steve Smith becoming number one in the world Test rankings for batsmen, deposing India’s captain Virat Kohli. “Yes, he [Smith] has told us this morning,” Paine said ironically.
This levity, however, occurred the day before the match which will go so far to fix their reputations: and the parallels
Both men will have their reputation determined over the course of the next fortnight
between the captains extend further, in that both will surely have spent at least part of the night grappling with the spectre of their chief opponent.
Paine openly admitted: “I’ve lost a bit of sleep about how we’re going to get him out” – him being, of course, Ben Stokes. Stokes’s century at Lord’s saved the second Test for England, his unbeaten and unbeatable 135 at Headingley won the third. Dropped twice off Nathan Lyon at the start of this power-surge, Stokes has grown rampantly into one of the game’s giants.
Paine also has to live with the mistakes he made when failing to bring in the field for the fifth ball of an over in Leeds, giving Stokes a single and his bowlers only one ball per over at Jack Leach. “We make mistakes, and I was certainly one of those who made mistakes,” he acknowledged with typical and admirable candour.
Root has told us before how he often went sleepless during a Test match, although that was before fatherhood, which might have trained him not to waste the chance of a good night completely. So while Paine is wrestling with Stokes, Root is grappling with the Frankenstein’s monster he unleashed when he spread the field at Edgbaston in only the 13th over of this series, allowing Smith to accumulate all the leg-side singles he desired.
Or else, in Root’s nightmares, is it Dracula that Smith resembles? For Paine, the pain is Stokes; for Root, the creation of Bram Stoker.
At Lord’s, when Root released Jofra Archer, his new fast bowler hit Smith on the back of the neck and concussed him, but was unable to impale Dracula. After missing the third Test, Smith is back but has yet to face a bouncer in the middle: he saw nothing faster than medium pace in the tour game against Derbyshire which the Australians won by an innings. Root might have preferred a faster pitch than Old Trafford’s dry offering, but in hitting batsmen 13 times in his two Tests, Archer has proved he can strike anyone, on any pitch, any time.
As for the future, Paine has always said his place in Australia’s side is short-term, and Alex Carey is already prepared to take over as wicketkeeper; Paine might even bear in mind Usman Khawaja, last week Australia’s captain at Derby, this week dumped by their selectors.
Root will dream of an attack of Archer, James Anderson and Stuart Broad, which would be the best three-man attack England have had, and maybe dream in vain; but at least he can sleep in the knowledge he will continue as England’s Test captain, irrespective of the result of this series, as there is nobody else in town.