ASHES SPECIAL
Root ready to put 2013-14 whitewash behind him and make his mark Down Under
O Na gentle autumn al morning in south Yorkshire, Joe Root — captain of England — is lying on his tummy in leaves and gravel, pretending to look for a ball under a car. As pre-Ashes poses go, it isn’t necessarily designed to strike fear into Australian hearts.
But this is a PR shoot and Root is playing along with good humour. Moments later, he is du sting himself off a little sheepishly. The owners of the car are back and trying to make sense of the scene. ‘You’ll never guess who I had under my car this morning…’
It is hard to think of Lord Hawke being quite so game, or Len Hutton or Ray Illingworth. But the early signs are that Root — the latest captain to breathe life into the old myth about a strong Yorkshire meaning a strong England — is not going to be bogged down by precedent.
We are at Abbeydale Sports Club, where he last represented Sheffield Collegiate CC in 2011. ‘Not a bad pitch,’ he says. ‘Turns a bit.’ The scorecard of that game backs him up. Opening the bowling, he took eight for 42 with his off-breaks to skittle Castleford for 91, before his younger brother Billy helped polish off the runs.
This vignette is all very calm-before- the- storm. Picturesque Abbeydale is a world away from Brisbane’ s row dy Gabba, all concrete and plastic. And yet so close, for it is there, on Wednesday night, that Root will embark on the biggest challenge of his career.
His batting we know about. His 60 Tests have brought him an average of 54, England’s highest since Ken Barrington in the late Sixties.
In ODIs that figure is exactly 50 — second only to Jonathan Trott among England batsmen — and in T20s almost 40 — higher than any compatriot who has played more than three games. So, yes, his batting is doing just fine. It is his captaincy that is still finding its way. The tendency so far, after only seven Tests in charge, has been to see Root as a more aggressive leader than Alastair Cook.
And when he is asked to name his favourite moment of the summer, he is drawn to a dismissal which, under Cook, might never have happened. ‘ It was a really nice moment when Moeen Ali got Hashim Amla out at Old Trafford,’ he says. ‘We’d tried a number of things. Then we tried Moeen at the bottom end, where t here wasn’t as much rough, but we changed the field round a little bit and he bowled a brilliant delivery which opened the game right up. From that point, we were quick to finish things off.’
Root s eems reluctant to be pigeonholed, as if unconsciously echoing Mike Brearley’s line about the ‘requirement of flexibility’. But he does concede: ‘You always want to look to win as much as possible. I like to think my batting’s a good mirror of how I want to go about my cricket. Hopefully that can rub off on my captaincy.’
Five wins out of seven during the summer against South Africa and West Indies were a good start but it was the two defeats that were more instructive.
Against South Africa at Trent Bridge, Root’s second game in the job, England were bowled out twice in 96 overs, prompting Michael Vaughan to accuse them of a ‘lack of respect’ for Test cricket.
ROOT was stung but also smart enough to absorb its central truth. In the next Test at The Oval, England compiled a calm 353 and won easily. ‘We learned we could be mature, sensible and patient,’ says Root. ‘It probably did take that Trent Bridge game to give us a boot in the right direction and the lads responded well. Since then we have been a lot better about reading a situation.’
Which brings us to the Headingley Test against West Indies — the game of the summer. When Root declared on the fourth evening, only a few old pros wondered why.
West Indies needed 322 in a day and a bit. Only one Test team had chased more to win at Headingley — Bradman’s 1948 Invincibles. It was not going to happen. Then it did. Root (below) felt he had given his side ‘the best chance of winning’. But there is a critical distance about his assessment of what went wrong a s Shai Hope spirited West Indies to one of the least expected wins in Test history. And it is a distance that ought to serve him well.
‘ One thing I learned was that, maybe in the first 20-30 overs on that last day, I was too worried about making sure we had all the catchers in instead of building pressure and being patient. And as a bowling side we probably didn’t quite get it right. We chased wickets rather than knowing that, if we put the ball in the right areas for long enough, it would be hard for guys to bat all day on a fifth-day wicket.’
The fact that he feels comfortable criticising his bowlers is another window into his cricketing soul. When Jimmy Anderson first played for England, Root was 11. Stuart Broad appeared four years later. Now imagine removing one of your boyhood heroes from the attack after only two overs, as Root did to Anderson. Asked for his biggest challenge, he does not hesitate.
‘I watched them as a kid, so trying to boss them around and take Ji mmy off after t wo overs… initially I didn’t know how it would go but they’re such good professionals and team men that actually it’s not an issue at all.’
Was Anderson grumpy? ‘ He’s always grumpy but a lot of the time it’s because he thinks he’s the man to turn the game round and bust an end open. It’s not because he doesn’t agree with your decision. He has that desire and hunger to go and win you the game. So long as you know that, there’s no issue.’
And Root also knows that, if England are to have any chance of emulating Andrew St ra uss’ s 2010-11 Ashes tourists, Anderson will have to find his form of that winter: 24 wickets at 26 and one in the eye for those who said he could not bowl with the Kookaburra on Australian pitches. Root’s first
experience of Australia, though, did not come until the 2013-14 whitewash — and it has left a mark. Losing 5-0 was bad enough. But he was also dropped, the only time in his international career, for the coup de grace at Sydney. ‘One thing about that experience is you hit rock bottom,’ he says. ‘You know what it feels like to be in that position and that’s a great driver to make sure you never experience it again. You’ve seen cricket at its most hostile. Nothing can be worse than that and you have to come out of it and be a better player.
‘I started to ask a lot of questions about myself and how I was going about things. The way I approach practice is very different now to what it was then. I just wasn’t being smart enough in how I practised.’
Since the end of that Ashes and the start of this one, no-one has scored more Test runs than Root — 4,368 at an average of almost 60.
Of course a trip to Australia is about more than the cricket. Much has been made, for instance, of David Warner’s conversion from the man who threw a punch at Root in a Birmingham bar in 2013 to a paragon of virtue known to team-mates as ‘The Reverend’.
But his description of cricket as ‘war’ and his insistence that ‘you have to delve and dig deep into yourself to actually get some hatred about them’, suggests a fleeting acquaintance with the dog collar.
ROOT is speaking from a position of strength. In the first Test against South Africa, he made 190. In t he first against West Indies, he hit 136. In all, six of his 13 Test hundreds have come in a series opener. And so Brisbane awaits, yet the alternative is a little sobering. Simply put: if Root fails, who succeeds?
Cook had the time of his life Down Under in 2010-11 but four of his other five Ashes have brought him an average in the 20s, while the candidates for the top five, Mark Stoneman, James Vince, Gary Ballance and Dawid Malan, inspire hope rather than expectation.
‘ It’s a great opportunity for someone to stand up and put their mark on Test cricket,’ says Root. ‘If you go and score runs in Australia, you earn a lot of respect throughout the world. I can’t see a better motivator to get yourself ready. If you have success out there, you’ve done it in the most pressurised tour as an Englishman and that should set you up for what’s to follow.
‘Of course there’ll be times when it might be quite rowdy and maybe feel intimidating. But that’s a great place to perform, to do it when it really counts and stand up for your team. That will be my attitude — what a great opportunity this is to prove a lot of people wrong and show them what a good squad we are.’
There is a low-key determination about the way Root talks. Perhaps he is a natural Yorkshireman after all. Just check under your car before you next turn on the engine. England need him.