Welcome to The Spin, the Guardian’s weekly (and free) cricket newsletter. Here’s an extract from this week’s edition. To receive the full version every Wednesday, just pop your email in below: An 11-year-old boy wears his cap everywhere, pulled low down over his brow, all the better for displaying the white rose stitched above his eyeline. He wears it when he accompanies his mum, Helen, around the shops in Sheffield. He wears it when he goes with his younger brother, Billy, to watch his dad, Matthew, play at the local cricket club. Being the older brother, the boy bats first, in his cap, while his brother bowls at him on the boundary edge.
A few months later the headwear in question, a Yorkshire schoolboy’s cricket cap, is still firmly perched atop the boy’s bright blond hair on a family trip to Trent Bridge to watch Nasser Hussain’s England play India. It’s still there after the close of play as he waits with his mum in the car park for the players to emerge. One of them, Craig White, notices the small boy’s head gear.
“Is that a Yorkshire cap?” White asks the lad. “Yes it is” replies the boy, beaming underneath its brim. “Brilliant,” White shoots back. “Maybe one day you’ll get to play with me.”
Five years later the boy, now a few inches taller but still small for his age, is about to make his debut for Yorkshire’s second XI. White is also playing. The boy plucks up the courage to remind White of their previous encounter. White is kind but it is clear he doesn’t remember. The boy does. It’s a special moment in the early age of Joe Root.
Root has seemingly been destined for batting greatness since he was a child but one of his defining strengths is his ability to score runs in adversity. Like all the truly great batters, he finds a way. In boyhood Root was so small that he could barely hit the ball off the square, he relied on crease occupation and deftly using the pace of the bowler in order to accumulate runs.
Eventually, Root made the passage from youth into young manhood with a growth spurt so rapid and significant that it ruined his technique and balance at the crease. His bat no longer resting on the ground, his head repeatedly falling over his newly lissom limbs, seeing him bowled often and an easy target for lbw.
After one spate of low scores a dejected, desperate Root sat in the Yorkshire dressing room in his pads, fresh off another lbw. Feeling inconsolable and “trapped in an alien body”, Root confided in Kevin Sharp, Yorkshire’s batting coach.
When he was batting, he could feel himself growing, becoming more and more disconnected from himself and what had previously felt so natural with every passing second at the crease. What did Root do? He knuckled down with Sharp and sorted it out. He recalibrated his technique over the next few months and got back to scoring runs. He found a way.
Root has done this throughout the various “ages” of his career. Take the impish joker who made his debut 10 years ago batting at No 6 in Nagpur on a lifeless track, joining Kevin Pietersen at the crease with an “All right lad, what’s going on?” and a chuckle as England teetered on 139 for 5. Root proceeded to bat for 229 balls to make 73, an assured innings that contained only four boundaries, no doubt informed by those lengthy stays at the crease as a diminutive batter of a few years earlier.
Or what about the more established Root of the 2013-14 Ashes who suffered his first (and really only) significant slump in form as a Test batter against a backdrop of Mitchell Johnson’s southpaw thunderbolts. Dropped for the Sydney Test, Root vowed to remember the sickening feeling of the moment he was told he was being discarded by the then captain, Alastair Cook, using it to fuel his desire to get back in the side and never be dropped again. He did and he hasn’t.
Then there’s Root’s “battus mirabilis” of last year that looks set to continue. Nine centuries in his past 21 matches despite the captaincy lying heavy and Covid bubbles taking their toll. Despite often finding himself the only form of resistance in a batting lineup that opposition bowlers could obliterate like bullets through rotten fruit.
This period saw a darker age of Joe, sad-eyed Rooty of the low scores, his features sunken, more gnarled and increasingly gaunt with burden. Yet despite all this, he found a way.
Sunday morning, under leaden skies that hang like Spanish moss over St John’s Wood, Root flicks a ball from Tim Southee off his pads and into the leg side. “Yep!” he calls and scampers two runs to bring up his 26th Test century and 10,000th run in Test cricket.
He removes his helmet, raises his arms, breaks into a smile – one simultaneously etched with happiness and relief. It is his first game back after relinquishing the captaincy and returning to the ranks. In the press conference in the moments after the game Root speaks honestly, haltingly, about how the captaincy had taken its toll on him. In a beat, a child-like glint appears as he describes his motivation to score runs for Ben Stokes and to win Test matches for England.
When he finishes speaking he heads out into the Lord’s murk. His cap is adorned not with a white rose but with three lions and the logo of a car company. He pulls it low over his eyes and heads off to celebrate with his teammates. The next age of Joe Root has begun.
