Joe Root: England’s Greatest Batter?

2024 has turned out to be yet another year of high achievement for England’s favourite batter, Joe Root. He is entering that phase of his career – he is still only 33 – where he is beginning to notch up national and international records.

In the second Test against Sri Lanka at Lord’s, Root scored two centuries in the match for a second time. More to the point, the centuries were the 33^rd and 34^th of Root’s career, equalling and then overtaking Alastair Cook’s record for Test hundreds by an England batter. He overtook Graham Gooch as the leading Test run-scorer at Lord’s and Michael Vaughan as the leading Test century-maker at the ground. By the time the series ended a week later at The Oval, Root had overtaken Kumar Sangakkara to become the sixth highest run scorer in Test cricket. Less than a month later, in an extraordinary innings victory over Pakistan in very different conditions in Multan, he scored 262, his highest score and his sixth double century, and in the process overtook Cook, to claim fifth place in the all-time runs list. With Harry Brook (317) he put on 454 for the fourth wicket, England’s highest partnership for any wicket, and the international record for the fourth wicket. Root now has two such records: he and James Anderson put on 198 for the tenth wicket against India at Trent Bridge in 2014. No other batter has two such records. There is now serious talk – as opposed to idle speculation – about Root overtaking Sachin Tendulkar’s run tally. With the amount of Test cricket England play, this is a real possibility.

There is no doubt about Root’s supremacy among England batters of his own era. So often he has seemed effectively to carry the batting, particularly during the period when he was also captain, which may help to explain his somewhat disappointing results in that capacity. (There are other extenuating circumstances here, not least the fact that Root was captain throughout the pandemic, when England continued to play more cricket than anyone else, and the fact that for English cricket’s managers white ball cricket was definitely a priority.)

Among those England batters with whom Root has played a substantial amount of cricket, the obvious comparison is with Cook, notwithstanding that Cook was an opener.

One gets the feeling, listening to Cook’s well-informed and good humoured commentary, that he would dismiss any such comparison. Of course Cook was a highly successful professional sportsperson, and is bound to have a hard core of selfishness about him, and not a whiff of false modesty. He also has a remarkable Test career of his own. Bearing in mind that he played in an era when opening the batting, especially in England, was peculiarly challenging, it is remarkable that he is the only opener in the top twelve Test run scorers of all time. But Cook has referred to Root’s genius; even in his most self-regarding moments, he would never have thought of himself in that way, let alone expressed such a thought.

Cook had a Test match batting average of 45 while Root’s average is currently 51. This is relevant. Both men played – have played, in Root’s case – an exceptional amount of Test cricket, and a career average over such a long period really tells you something.

Fifty is conventionally accepted as the mark of greatness for a Test match batter. Of the top fifteen leading run-scorers in Test cricket thirteen have career averages of over fifty; the exceptions are Cook, and Mahela Jayawardene, who averaged 49.84. This is obviously not a coincidence.

You can be a top Test side without having anybody averaging fifty. Andrew Strauss’s England side, which was Test cricket’s unofficial top dog in the years before Root’s career started, had a powerful and consistent top five who averaged between 40 and 47, plus Paul Collingwood and Matt Prior. The fact is you have to go back to the 1960s for an England batter with an average of 50 or more – Ken Barrington, who averaged an exceptional 58 over 82 Tests, and before him, Len Hutton and Denis Compton, whose careers started before World War Two. (Brook currently has an average of over fifty but it is early days yet.)

Are there other contenders for the essentially subjective title of England’s greatest batter? Gooch has his supporters. When he was Root’s age, in 1986, he had a Test average of 37. But by the early 1990s many people regarded him as the best batter in the world, making brilliant and valuable runs against the best attacks, and, in the Lord’s Test against India in 1990, scoring 456 runs, more than anyone else has ever scored in a Test match, including 333 in the first innings, the last triple century by an Englishman before Brook. Gooch was a dominator at the crease in a way that Root is not.

Two other England batters deserve a mention in this context. Neighbours, probably forever in the runs list, with 8,181 at 47.28, and 8,114, at 47.72 respectively, Kevin Pietersen and Geoffrey Boycott were as different from and as similar to each other as it is possible to be. Each had elements of genuine greatness. Each played a leading role in Ashes series wins, both home and away. Each was incredibly divisive and took selfishness to new levels. But Pietersen was a dominator, like Gooch: on his great days, Gooch plus. Boycott, on the other hand, was a master technician, once dropped for scoring too slowly.

So, Root is in exalted company. The same is clear when he is compared to his peers from other countries. It was the late, great Martin Crowe who identified the “Fab Four” – Steve Smith, Virat Kohli, Kane Williamson, and Root. They are of the same cricketing generation, more or less the same age.

Around 2019 there was a feeling that Root was falling behind the others. This manifested itself in one particular issue, a big issue for a player at this level – his conversion rate, the regularity with which he turned fifties into centuries. In 32 Tests between January 2018 and December 2020 he made four hundreds. He then had a total of 17 Test hundreds, well behind Kohli on 27, Smith on 26 and Williamson on 23.

Then something happened. It is not clear what. Maybe the pandemic gave Root a chance to reflect. It appears that he examined aspects of some of his great contemporaries’ play, especially Williamson. As of October 2024 he has 35 Test centuries; he has doubled his haul since December 2020. Smith and Williamson have 32, Kohli 29. Williamson averages just over 50 and Kohli just under. Smith averages 56.97 but after the 2019 Ashes he averaged 62.84. Root’s supremacy at this particular moment seems unchallengeable.

Of course it is not just about numbers. Root has always been a lovely player to watch, a batter who always seems to be in control and to make things look so easy. It is extraordinary how often he seems to get off the mark from his first ball. Before you know it he has got 25. He is a master in all conditions, perhaps the world’s best player of spin. He has all the shots, and then a few extra ones. He was the English batter who had the least need to adapt to the Bazball era but loyalty to the cause led him to try out reverse ramps and the like with spectacular if slightly mixed results. His strike rate has actually gone up in the last two years. In 2024, however, it was essentially the old, conventional Root that we saw. On the first day of that Lord’s Test against Sri Lanka, when he made 143 off 206 balls on the first day, the first time he tried something quirky, he was out.

At 33, Root is still just about at his peak. His powers certainly do not appear to be diminishing at all. The hunger, the drive and the fitness demonstrated at Multan were awe-inspiring.

One can be certain that he still has one clear personal ambition. On three tours of Australia – two as captain – he has yet to score a Test century there. Root will be very keen to put that right in 2025-26.