Ever since he was a young boy in the Yorkshire nets the country’s new Test leader has demonstrated that, experienced or not, he has the heart for the fightWhen Joe Root was 12 he won a prize coveted by every cricket-nut in Yorkshire: a trip to Headingley for a session in the indoor nets. Root and his father arrived early, in time to watch Yorkshire’s batting coach Kevin Sharp pepper the England batsman Anthony McGrath with short balls. Related: Joe Root appointed England Test captain with Ben Stokes his deputy Related: Jason Gillespie says the timing is perfect for Joe Root to become England captain Continue reading...
Yorkshireman, who looks set to replace Alastair Cook, is the right leader for the gung ho generation and his county’s record of Test captains augurs wellThe most measured, drama-free departure from the England captaincy in decades will surely be followed by the most uncontentious announcement of Alastair Cook’s successor within the next two weeks. Joe Root is poised to become England’s 80th Test captain. The chances of him being given the job are even greater than that of Celtic winning the Scottish Premiership – and they are currently 27 points ahead of their nearest challengers, Aberdeen.There are arguments against Root but none of them is decisive. There is no necessity for the best player to have the job – but...
It is possible to argue England could have won every short‑form game before that final thrashing had they not been undone by a series of improbable eventsTake the positives out of that then. Better to burn out than fade away and England’s cricketers certainly ended their white‑ball tour of India in a shared magnesium flare at the M Chinnaswamy Stadium. The insistence on building towards the Champions Trophy in June has been so relentless it was tempting to ask Eoin Morgan afterwards what positives he would be taking, what lessons learnt, skill-sets executed from losing eight wickets for eight runs in 19 balls in Bengaluru – on the bare figures, England’s worst batting collapse in any kind of cricket.Except of course...
Most batsmen would be delighted with the year Root has had, but he is irked to have often fallen with a century there for the taking. In Chennai, the story was the sameIf Joe Root was just a regular batsman he would look back on 2016 with little but fondness, having scored more heavily in Test cricket than ever before and during this time produced a career-best score of 254 against Pakistan in the summer.With one innings to go in Chennai, Root has returned 1,471 runs – a total that has him two ahead of Jonny Bairstow as the pair vie to overhaul Michael Vaughan’s England record of 1,481 in 2002 – and for the second year running has matched...
The tourists ended day one in the ascendancy thanks to Joe Root and Moeen Ali but the No1-ranked Test side are far from beatenAfter suffering a first defeat by Bangladesh and the horror show of a 10-wicket collapse inside a session that brought it about England went into the first day of their five-Test series with India as a team who could ill-afford any more dents to their confidence in the opening exchanges. With no warm-up games scheduled – a mistake unlikely to be repeated – only net practice and team talks came before the most daunting of away series. They needed a few things to go their way in Rajkot to establish an early foothold. Related: Joe Root and...