Joe Root hits out at ‘substandard’ Lord’s pitch after England’s three-day Test win
England’s bowlers will not thank Joe Root for it but their captain was highly critical of the Lord’s pitch after his side’s 143-run victory against Ireland. “I don’t like saying this but the wicket was substandard for a Test match,” Root said after Ireland were bowled out for 38. “It wasn’t even close to being a fair contest between bat and ball throughout the whole game.”
He admitted his team “weren’t at our best by any stretch” but, in what came across as a pretty clear dig at the Lord’s groundsman, Karl McDermott, Root said: “When you are getting scores like that, that tells a story in itself.”
McDermott, who took over the job only last December, has just over a fortnight to get his surface ready for the second Ashes Test. Root said he hoped the pitch would be better than this one. “We’ll have to wait and see if it is similar,” he said. “I don’t think it will be.”
If it is, England “will have to make sure we try to exploit it the best we can, to find a method to cope and score runs. The challenge will be the same for Australia as it was for us and Ireland this week. It will make for entertaining cricket if that’s the case.”
The blunt truth is that it was not only the pitch that was substandard but the batting too, since both teams were bowled out in the space of a single session. Root insisted “from a batting point of view, it’s hard to take too much out of it on a surface like that” and that “it’s hard for anyone to read too much into this in very extreme conditions”.
He did admit “we have got to be more precise about how we want to defend” and that he was personally responsible for “opening the door for Ireland” in the second innings, when he “stupidly” ran out Joe Denly.
Lurking in the background behind all this talk about the pitch, there is a suggestion that Root and the other players who turned out for England in the World Cup are exhausted. Root did not deny he was feeling “knackered” and said: “It’s been 10 weeks of hard cricket, of high emotion, of ups and downs. It does take a lot out of you.”
He did not want to make an excuse of it. “You have to suck it up and get on with it. It’s not been perfect but we’ve dealt with it pretty well. It’s hard to look too much into performances on there but mentally coping with it I think we’ve done all right.
“We’ve never been in a position where we’ve won a World Cup, so for half the side to be part of that and then very quickly adjust to Test cricket is unusual. You’ve never been in that position before, so it’s hard to know how you’re going to cope.”
Personally he had turned up at Lord’s “feeling extremely excited for the Test summer” and now its preface was over he felt “pleased we managed to find a way to win this game. There’s been so many different pressures and challenges thrown at us”.
There have but it is all about to get that much more pressured and that much more challenging again. The hard part is only just starting.