Root has the stamina and skill to surpass Tendulkar’s record

No milestone is out of reach for a batsman who continues to set the highest standards

For me, Joe Root stands alongside Graham Gooch as England’s greatest batsman and the way he is going he could surpass Sachin Tendulkar’s record for the most Test runs.

He is still almost 6,000 short of Sachin’s total of 15,921, but he is only 31. If James Anderson can play until he is 40, then I think Joe can, too.

He loves batting that much. He is driven. He is a cricket badger. You have to have it in you to wake up every morning and think about batting.

The best modern players have such a professional outlook on the game. They are driven to want to improve all the time.

Why is Joe so good? He plays the game in a neutral way.

A lot of modern players seem to be over-complicating life, batting outside off stump, running down the wicket, batting a yard or two outside the crease, which shows to me they are more concerned about what the bowler is going to do to them more than anything else. I look at quality players such as Joe and they bat on middle, head over the top of off stump, nice and upright with a hovering backlift.

Joe knows exactly where his bat is and his feet are in a neutral position, they are aligned towards the angle of the ball whether it is left-arm over, right-arm over or left-arm round. That technique allows him to press forward when the ball is full, and be in a nice position to hang back to length deliveries, playing them late.

His top hand generally does a lot of the work, so he has control of shots, guiding the ball around. He is nicely balanced when the ball is on middle or leg stump to hit through the on side on front and back foot.

All the great players pick up length quickly and he does that as well as anybody.

He runs between the wickets quickly and scores all the way around the ground, so it is very difficult to set a field. He owns the channel outside off stump as well as anyone I have seen.

The straight-batted glance down to third man is such a good shot. He plays a lot of good balls late under his eyeline, letting the ball hit the bat so it just glides through the fourth or fifth slip region.

It means the opposition have to pack that quarter of the ground quite heavily.

Because teams have so many fielders square of the wicket, as soon as the ball is under his nose he can hit straight, through the gaps.

Mid-off is always quite wide to him, so there is always a space he has created because of his glides through third man. He clearly has an incredible eye and appetite to score runs, too.

Coaching is about getting the best out of the individual. Over time, you understand that players play differently.

In India, you see a modern player coming through their system with pure basics. They are drilled from an early age to be nice and still on release of the ball, head and shoulder going towards the ball, top hand taking over and getting a nice stride in.

In this country, are we analysing how great a player we have in Joe Root? Are our coaches in our systems telling kids to copy Joe? Give me a Root-style player over anybody else, because he can adapt to any situation.

For all the restructuring in the game, which I back, one of the simplest things we could do is just copy Joe. He is not Steve Smith – he would be impossible to copy because he is so quirky. But players who play so technically correct like Joe are surely the example for kids to follow.

That is the way you play. From 11 onwards, kids should be taught the Joe way. If not, then something is not right.

Put it this way, if we had one more Root in this England side, they would be a dangerous team, so let’s try to create more Joes for the future. He has not managed a century in Australia. That is a blip. I honestly believe that if he had arrived in Australia in better circumstances, with more preparation and no Covid bubbles, he would have scored one or two hundreds in the last Ashes.

People talk about mental toughness and what it is. Joe has defined it over the past two years, somehow finding a way to look calm and score runs when there was chaos around him.

The past two years were the hardest time to be the England captain. But he managed to shut out the external noise when he was in the middle.

It was the best example of mental toughness that I have seen.

From 11 onwards, kids should be taught the Joe way. If not, then something is not right