'YEAH!'

GH on Joe Root

It is one thing to watch Joe Root in his present, peerless form; listening to him can be equally instructive.  You see him leaning into those streamlined shapes he forms in driving through point, and flicking through midwicket, or leaning back to glide behind square on each side.  Then, almost without fail, the stump mic picks up a laconic: ‘Yeah!’ 

I mean, Joe, c’mon - most of the time it’s going for four, and nothing less.  But somehow, the world’s best batter must do everything properly - each shot is signed with a firm, decisive call, just the way you’re taught, just the way you should.  It doesn’t call attention to itself.  Nothing much about Root does.  He was always a willing conscript to Bazball rather than an eager volunteer, and he has looked a better player since largely sheathing that reverse ramp since Rajkot. Now he’s back to playing Joeball, and it somehow becomes him more.

I called him the world’s best, but he’s actually a little more than that, because he’s also sustaining his bestness.  His ICC ranking after this Lord’s Test will probably exceed 900, within sight of a career high of 923 two years ago.  Kane Williamson is next, but ten per cent off his previous peak, while batting’s other big beasts, Steve Smith and Virat Kohli, are respectively, twenty per cent and twenty-one per cent off theirs.  Since the start of 2021, Root has made seventeen Test hundreds, versus Williamson’s nine, Smith’s six and Kohli’s two.

There is another counterpoint to this, for Root is making batting look as easy at the moment as his captain is making it hard.  Ollie Pope, in stance and stroke production, could at times almost pass as a double for Root, but he has all the form and none of the substance.  About Root there is never any strain, even when there is force.  Pope grips the bat like it is his last friend in the world; he lunges at the ball as though it is his enemy.  The gap between his rank and his runs is yawning.

The gap between Root’s runs and his rank, meanwhile, is narrowing, as he seems to be taking almost nothing out of himself, ascribing this to a personal batting audit he commenced during COVID in the interests of his endurance and his productivity.  He walked off after his thirty-fourth and fastest hundred on Saturday as though he had just taken a gentle lap, then proceeded to pocket his 199th and 200th Test catches, even if you seldom think of him in the front rank of fielders - catching is just something he has gone on doing, with an excellence almost perfunctory.

Never mind that Root will shortly pass Alastair Cook’s England benchmark; at this rate, he will be Test cricket’s second-greatest run getter by the time of the next Ashes.  And then, perhaps, he will take care of that strange lacuna in his career: no century in Australia from three previous tours, about which he needs no reminding.

The only sorrow about watching Root in this avatar is that he’s playing to the accompaniment of one hand clapping.  He’s excelling at poor old broken down Test cricket, whose mendicant status has been confirmed by the fact that the ICC is now offering it an underwriting of ‘$5-10 million’, a fraction of what it offered in the same context a decade ago.  The ‘big three’ are now like the parishioner who sees the collection plate coming round and asks the person sitting next to them for change.  So, hey, enjoy Joe while the money lasts.  Who knows?  Maybe he’ll even get better.  Can you, Joe?  ‘Yeah!’