An innings with Root

What's it like inside the head of England's best player? A meeting in Sheffield offered a few answers

Still counting in fives?

How does it feel to be Joe Root, right here, right now, in September 2024 Earth-time? How is life inside that feedback loop of endlessly reinforced success? Pretty good, you would imagine.

In 2017 I went to meet him in Sheffield. Wisden Almanack had commissioned a piece on the 254 he’d made against Pakistan at Old Trafford the previous summer, then and still his highest Test score. He said he could meet me at his golf club, which I thought might be some sort of lavish affair but turned out to be a homely backwater with a clubhouse full of people who obviously knew and liked Root and his family.

He had the air of a favourite grandson, a little bit taller than the last time you saw him, good company, a good listener. By the end I almost wanted to slip him a furtive fiver to spend. Looking back at the piece I wrote, so much was different, so much the same.

Alastair Cook was captain. Alex Hales was his opening partner. Root was batting at three, James Vince at number four, Gary Ballance at five. Jonny Bairstow was keeping wicket. Mark Ramprakash was England’s batting coach. What fates awaited them all…

It was Root’s Forty-fourth Test. He’d made three and a half thousand runs at an average of 52.20, but that average was on the slide, coming down from a high of 57.11 in his twenty-fourth game. Nice problem to have, though. He was, I wrote, ‘being talked about more and more as one of the best four batsmen in the world across all formats.’

The early summer had been cold. In three Tests against Sri Lanka, he’d made 0, 80, 3 and 4, and then played an ODI series against them before Pakistan arrived for four Tests and five ODIs. In the first Test at Lord’s he’d got out in quite un-Rootlike ways, slog-sweeping on 48 in the first innings and then mishitting a pull in the second. England had collapsed and Pakistan pulled off one of their mercurial wins.

Afterwards, Ramprakash asked him if perhaps he’d still been in one-day mode and Root had been quite annoyed by the suggestion, but when he thought about it more, he remembered his first innings dismissal. The slog sweep had come a ball after he’d swept Yasir Shah for four, and as the next delivery came down, a little wider, a little slower, he thought ‘there’s fifty,’ and mishit the shot.

He hadn’t been patient. Shah had out-thought him. He went back to the nets with Ramprakash, who used his dog-stick to replicate the angles of Pakistan’s three left arm seamers, Mohammad Amir, Rahat Ali and Wahab Riaz.

“I had a strange feeling,” he said. “you don’t get it very often… My movement was right, feet in sync. I had a lot of confidence.”

His supplier had sent a couple of nice new bats to Lord’s and as he got ready for Old Trafford he noticed that he hadn’t taped up the handles like he usually would – another sign that he hadn’t been as prepared as he’d thought.

Cook won the toss. Root had a cup of tea and got padded up. He sat and watched, but not too hard because it could be draining, especially if the bowling was good. Then it could amplify your doubts, sap you before you even got out there. After half an hour, Amir bowled Hales with what looked like a tremendous late inswinger but as Root gathered his kit he saw the TV replay and realised Hales had played the wrong line, which settled him down a bit.

“When you’re watching telly it looks like it’s moving more than it is,” he said. “You can’t talk yourself out of scoring runs, or feel like it’s difficult and think about all this stuff when you’re going out there. The best way I can describe it is it’s like learning to drive a car. The first time it seems like everything’s happening all at once but the more you do it the more naturally it comes. You don’t think. The ideal place when you walk out is just, right, watch the ball.”

He took guard on middle and off. Third ball he pumped Rahat back down the ground and did the same in the next over to Amir, who then hit him on the shoulder with a short ball that hurt, but not as much as it had done when Mitchell Johnson hit him there the year before. All of this flashed through his head. He tried to smile that little Joe Root grin to show that he was alright but it came out more like a grimace. He got through to lunch thinking, five runs at a time. Before the break Yasir Shah came on and he hit him for three boundaries.

He had lunch, but as usual when he was batting, struggled to eat. He often had a protein shake or a power bar, something easy. After the break, things were slow. Misbah liked to have sweepers out and just sit on a partnership until he stifled it and forced a mistake. Even Cooky outscored him, which never happened. When Cook reached 97, Root played the slog sweep off Yasir and nailed it. Cook gave him a ‘reign it in’ type look. Then Cook got his twenty-ninth Test hundred. ‘That’s not bad…’ Root thought. Root had nine.

He got into the eighties and felt the tension. He concentrated on five, then five more. Cook got out. Root got to 96. Vince got out. He wanted to be on strike to Yasir because that was the best chance of a loose ball.

“I managed to get one between midwicket and mid-on,” he said. “It’s a strange feeling when you get to a hundred because there’s that excitement element but the over-riding feeling is relief. As a kid when I got them, it was all excitement, all happy, but it changes slightly. It’s different now.”

By the end of the day, he’d made 141 and he was knackered. Misbah had kept men back so he’d done a lot of running. He was dropped off Yasir early the next morning and he told himself to make it count. He was batting with Stokes, who rattled things along, and he got to 196 still facing Yasir Shah. Misbah moved his backward point to square leg and Root reverse-swept him through the gap to get the double, his second. Stokes got out and Bairstow came in and got fifty and then Root started to think that three hundred wasn’t that far away, but neither was the declaration. Wahab Riaz put one in the slot but he mishit it and got caught.

“After, it was a blur really,” he said. “All of the lads were saying well played, but you’re still in the middle of a Test match. I think it’s not even once the game’s won that it really hits you – maybe it’s like a real long time later that you’re driving along or something and you think, yeah, you know, that was a special day.”

That meeting really doesn’t feel like a long time ago, but Joe Root has scored another 24 Test hundreds since then. And 24 is more than any other England player ever, apart from Alastair Cook. When he’s batting I sometimes think about what he said and wonder what’s going on in his head, is he still counting in fives, has he taped his bat handle up, does he still hope to be facing a particular bowler when he’s on 96?

Batting is an intimate experience and every innings comes with its own internal monologue. As David Gower once said, ‘it may not look like I’m trying, but I am, really hard.’ Joe Root was both eloquent and generous enough to let a little light in on how the experience is for him. Even when it’s good, it takes a lot.