The England captain’s carefully plotted rise is a reflection of the ECB’s central planning but cricket’s fragmentation into different leagues and franchises may bring that era to a close
When he was 15 Joe Root drew a sketch of a cricket stadium and wrote on it, “today was the day I realised I would become a world-class batsman”. He still has that picture. Presumably he keeps it somewhere special, only bringing it out now and then, maybe when he’s doing an interview.
You may have read the novel A Confederacy Of Dunces, in which John Kennedy Toole’s furiously hopeless anti-hero Ignatius J Reilly spends some of his spare time going to the cheesiest, schmaltziest romantic movie matinees in downtown New Orleans in order to sit in the front row shouting things like “OH MY GOD!” and “WHAT NOW?” and “This is even worse than I imagined!”, all the while wrenching his great fat neck from side to side in spluttering mediaevalist outrage.
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