Tearful Root rises from captain’s ashes to lead once again
Public displays of emotion are rare from Joe Root, sitting uneasily with his image of immaculate self-control. But with one elegant clip into the leg side, out to midwicket, a few long-sublimated sentiments bubbled to the surface. Relief, pride, happiness, satisfaction: all were etched across his face as he took a standing ovation for his 26th century, the rapture of the reception moving him, most unusually, to shed a tear.
This was an achievement of multilayered significance for Root. To shed the robes of captaincy is typically to find yourself hastened towards the door. Except Root consistently breaks the mould, a player who, with or without the encumbrance of leadership, is a totem of strength in an often fragile England team. He marked his first Test as an ex-captain in precisely the same fashion as when elevated to the top job in 2017, with a century at Lord’s.
And yet, the scoreboard told only a fraction of the story. For as he raised his bat, Root was toasting two other landmark distinctions: his first hundred in a fourth innings, and his accumulation of 10,000 Test runs, underscoring his status as an alltime great with so much more still to give. The greatest ever for England?
It is a debate fraught with complication, but Root’s credentials for carrying this side on his slender shoulders are impeccable. Where Alastair Cook had Andrew Strauss and Kevin Pietersen to share the burden, Root has orchestrated many of his finest feats essentially alone. Even in an otherwise wretched 2021, he amassed the third-highest total of Test runs by any batsman in a calendar year. The No3 spot on England’s list for the same period, just behind Rory Burns, was taken by “extras”.
Root could play for a further five years, potentially granting him another 60 Tests. Such longevity is far from fanciful, given how infrequently he is injured. There was an almost absurd symmetry here with Cook, who recorded his 10,000th run at exactly the same age of 31 years and 157 days. But where Cook’s powers were beginning to attenuate by that stage, Root appears only to know how to accelerate. And even after the indignity of being replaced as captain by Ben Stokes, he still produced a century of inimitable, imperishable quality.
How fortunate Stokes is, in this complex transition period, to have somebody of Root’s pedigree at his disposal. Root has been the model predecessor, refusing to gripe openly about the circumstances of his departure, resisting any interviews and instead investing himself in his batting. For all the slings and arrows he faced during his five years at the helm, he has remained a figure of fundamental decency.
Such is the peerlessness of Root’s craft, and the rate at which he is hunting down Cook’s England record of 12,472 runs, it would take a hard-hearted soul to deny him a knighthood in the near future. For his is a CV that stands up to scrutiny against all who have come before. Sachin Tendulkar might be far in the distance on the all-time list, on 15,921 Test runs, but a substantial proportion of those were acquired on lifeless Indian pitches. Root, by contrast, has spent the majority of his career dealing with a viciously seaming Dukes ball. The one conspicuous omission in his body of work is a hundred in Australia.
His fifth Test century at Lord’s was a classic of his oeuvre: watchful at first, then serenely moving up through the gears once he no longer had Stokes for security as his partner. Even in leaden conditions, with heavy cloud cover, Root approached his task in a manner that belied the precariousness of the match situation, concluding with three fours off one Tim Southee over.
“The greatest feeling ever,” he called the moment of his hundred, with wife Carrie visibly moved as she watched from the stands. You sensed, too, that it only heightened his appetite for the fight, fortifying his resolve to make the final third of his playing days as luminous as the previous two.
He is the finest asset a captain could wish for. Pietersen reflected recently on how much he loved batting alongside Root on the Yorkshireman’s Test debut in Nagpur a decade ago, marvelling at how calm he stayed, even when faced with the pressure of trying to seal England’s first series victory in India for 28 years. Those same implacable qualities have endured through the tumult of a captaincy spell that ultimately fell short. “Mr Dependent,” Stokes called him, lost in admiration, after Root completed this run chase against New Zealand in time to give the Sunday spectators a full refund. Truly, there could be no higher accolade.