Joe Root isn’t making centuries – but he’s invaluable to this England team
TV commentators and print journalists seem to be obsessed by Joe Root’s repeated “failures” to convert fifties into hundreds, and the frequency with which he gets out, one way or another, in the 70s and 80s. Big centuries are what’s needed, we are told; it’s big hundreds that win Test matches. There’s some truth in this, though no more, and indeed less, than the old observation that it’s bowlers who win matches, the batsmen’s job being to score enough runs to enable them to be in a position to do so.
Actually of course the concentration on Root’s “failure” is a distraction, a distraction indeed which must be quite welcome to the other English batsmen. Root’s tendency to get out for 70 or 80 wouldn’t matter a damn if three or four of his colleagues were doing that too. It’s obvious. If four batsmen each make 70, that’s 280 on the board, and if the other seven men can scrape up 120 between them, you’ve got a total of 400, which, in English conditions anyway, is more often than not a position from which you go on win the match.
However, in the first innings at Edgbaston, Root made 80, Jonny Bairstow 70, and England were all out for 287. That’s to say the other nine members of the team, with a little help from Extras, made 137 in total. Pretty dismal, you may say. Nevertheless, much of the coverage concentrated on the run-out of Root – result of a somewhat chancy second run and a brilliant piece of fielding by Virat Kohli. Beyond that, there was criticism of the less than judicious stroke that saw Bairstow depart soon after his captain. Two players escaped lightly: Josh Buttler, lbw, playing across the line, second ball he received, and Ben Stokes, edging a long-hop from Ashwin and giving the bowler a dolly return catch. Yet England’s failure to post a good total was evidently, in the opinion of many pundits, all the fault of Root and Bairstow.
Of course, there is some reason to blame them: batsmen who are well-set should go on to make a big score. On the other hand, there is no reason to acquit those others who failed completely. Alastair Cook got a very good ball from Ashwin, though he might have played it if he had got properly forward. Keaton Jennings at least made 42, quite a decent score, and was marginally unlucky to play on and see a bail just dislodged – but the ball went back towards the stumps because his defensive stroke was too deeply angled. Dawid Malan, like Buttler, played across the line and was lbw. Reasons and excuses abound, but the fact is that batsmen 1,2,4,6 and 7 made only 84 runs between them.
In short, England fail to post adequate totals not because Root fails to convert fifties to hundreds, but because most of his batsmen don’t get to 50. Indeed, remove Jennings’s 42, and Cook, Malan, Stokes and Butler had an aggregate score of 42. Of course, some of them will make big scores on other days, but not enough of them do so regularly in the same match.
This being so, England’s record over the last couple of years would have been worse than it is if the pattern of Root’s scoring had been like Alastair Cook’s: a succession of cheap dismissals interspersed with the occasional big, sometimes very big, hundred. Like any sensible person I have a great admiration for Cook. He has had a remarkable career. If his career Test average has now dropped to the middle 40s, it should be remembered that, when making comparisons, one should add 5 to the average of anyone who has always, even usually, opened the innings, facing fresh bowlers with the new ball and perhaps 3 to anyone regularly coming in first wicket down. I admire Cook because he had, I think, less natural talent than many, and has made more of what he was blessed with than most.
In this he resembles Geoffrey Boycott. Near the beginning of Boycott’s Test career, Neville Cardus wrote an article in Wisden about Tom Graveney in which, as an aside, he spoke of “an artisan like Boycott building his brick wall of an innings.” But the artisan made himself into a great batsman, and the same may be said of Alastair Cook. Boycott scored his last Test centuries when he was over 40, one of them against Michael Holding and the other members of the West Indies’ fearsome pace attack; Cook can go on for quite a bit yet, if he wants to. Nevertheless, given his current fallibility and the fragility of his opening partners, Root’s ability to reel off scores between 50 and 100 has been invaluable. One might add that it is only rarely that he has had the luxury of coming in to bat, at 4 or now at 3, with 100 or 150 runs on the board.
The English top order is more fragile than at any time I remember. In Home Test matches this has mattered less because most visiting teams have quite often been fragile themselves in English conditions. So things have evened out. Abroad it has been a different matter – except, oddly perhaps, in South Africa. But the fact is that there is no depth of talent to draw on. There are few English, or England-qualified, batsmen with a career first-class average over 40. This is partly because while for quite a long time regulations regarding the covering of pitches made life easier for batsmen and correspondingly harder for bowlers, the ECB’s decision to confine the County Championship to the first and last weeks of the season has undoubtedly meant more first-class cricket is played in conditions which favour the bowlers. This may be preferable to playing on featherbed wickets, but it isn’t the way to develop Test match batsmen.
Consequently, while one would like to see Root converting half-centuries to centuries, and while he himself must be very keen to do this, England would be very much worse off if he hit a big century followed by a succession of half-a-dozen innings between 0 and 30.