Legacy piece: Why Joe Root's defining Ashes awaits

Joe Root's most recent Ashes memory in Australia is barely a memory at all. Stricken by sunstroke, incapacitated by illness, England's captain came gingerly off the Sydney Cricket Ground, climbed onto a physio's bed, and promptly fell asleep. 

As he recalls it now, Root had spent the previous night "being violently sick" in his hotel room, before being taken to hospital and put on a drip. He made it back to the SCG midway through the first session of the next day's play, and resumed his place in the middle at the fall of Moeen Ali's wicket.

Perhaps mercifully, much of the rest is a blur.

"I was absolutely knackered," he tells cricket.com.au, "but I just remember wanting to get to the ground, to try to get back out there to play.

"Then with about five minutes to lunch I remember thinking: You've just got to get through to lunch, have a little break, come back out, and it'll be fine," Root tells cricket.com.au.

"I remember a bouncer from Josh Hazlewood just going into lunch, but that's about all I can muster … then getting to lunch, and coming off … and I told the guys to wake me up when the lunch break was over.

"The next time I woke up, I think the game was over."

In a fifth Test that had no bearing on the series outcome, Root made 83 and 58, batting for just under eight hours and facing more than 300 balls as England lost by an innings to surrender the series 4-0.

Afterwards, in Root's absence, Jimmy Anderson was asked how he thought his skipper had found the tour.

"I imagine extremely difficult," Anderson replied, adding some further context before closing his answer with a positive. "He should be very proud of what he's done on this trip."

Four years on, as Root sits in another hotel room – this time in Brisbane, this time fit and well – those answers are put to him as questions: Was it extremely difficult? Are you proud?

His answers lean towards yes, and then no, but it is less clear-cut than that.

"I look back at that series and think I'd loved to have contributed more heavily runs-wise," he begins. "And I think we could have done things slightly differently … it was my first tour as captain, so I learned a huge amount from it."

What is notable about Root's response is that he lands on the runs first. There were five fifties in five Tests but, quite famously now, zero hundreds.

He has discussed previously how it was, and is, a frustration for him, yet there is an obvious silver lining. As he prepares for what lies ahead, the optimist in Root might review that tour as one large fact-finding mission; umpteen hours spent at the crease, innings of substance built, and all against the same bowlers he will again face, in predominantly the same conditions.

Only now, he is the world's top-ranked Test batter, and in the form of his life.

"He knows what to expect – he's been here and seen it all before," Test legend Ricky Ponting tells cricket.com.au. "And the thing that he's got in his favour this time is he's going to come here confident in his own game, having just had the best 12 months he's probably had in his career, and that goes a long way."

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Joe Root's Ashes tours

2013-14: Four matches, 192 runs at 27.42. 1x50. HS: 87

2017-18: Five matches, 378 runs at 47.25. 5x50s. HS: 83

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Three summers ago, when India toured Australia to contest the Border-Gavaskar Trophy, the sense was that a series success for the visitors – something they had never achieved Down Under – would go a long way to determining Virat Kohli's legacy as a captain.

Kohli had already plundered four hundreds in four Tests in India's previous tour to Australia, emphatically ticking that particular box on his path to being recognised among Test cricket's modern batting greats.

Returning to this summer, and a low public expectation for English success together with Root's unprecedented form through 2021 has centred commentary on the 30-year-old's legacy as a batter.

Root's blue eyes gleam when talk turns this way. He can at times be a man of cricketing clichés but there nonetheless seems a genuineness to him, and a surprising intensity. Both are evident when he vocalises the mountain of runs he has dreamed of scoring on an Ashes tour. His legs tense, almost springing him out of his chair, as if the thoughts, now spoken, must immediately turn to action.

"As an England player, it's the one place in the world where you want to have that bumper series – that massive aggregate of runs under your belt at the end of it, and that little urn next to you as well," he says of Australia.

"That's the dream, and one thing I've probably been guilty of in the past is trying too hard, and wanting it too much here."

Until this year, Root's batting record as captain didn't measure up to the lofty numbers he accumulated beforehand. The fact his tenure had been marred by a conversion issue only strengthened the argument that his thought process while batting was being muddied by external matters.

Injuries and selections, politics and administration, media and promotion; all issues a captain must consider, and all wholly irrelevant when facing up to the bowler.

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Joe Root's Test batting

Before captaincy: 53 matches, 4,594 runs at 52.80. 11x100s, 27x50s. HS: 254

As captain: 56 matches, 4,684 runs at 47.79. 12x100s, 23x50s. HS: 228

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Whether the theory was accurate or merely a convenient connecting of dots is hard to know, but another point shouldn't be missed here; despite a lowering of his own standards, Root kept scoring Test runs at an aggregate unmatched worldwide. 

Part of that of course comes down to England's sheer volume of Test cricket, but it is instructive too that none of his teammates came close to his 3,229 runs at 42.48 (six hundreds, 22 fifties) between the time he became captain through to the end of 2020.

Perhaps it was a necessary evolution as a forerunner to his history-making deeds in 2021, a year in which he has developed the mental and technical proficiency to spend consistently lengthy periods in the middle.

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Joe Root's longest Test innings

636 mins (226 runs) v New Zealand, Nov 2019

614 mins (254) v Pakistan, July 2016

536 mins (218) v India, Feb 2021

533 mins (180no) v India, Aug 2021

500 mins (200no) v Sri Lanka, Jun 2014

495 mins (186) v Sri Lanka, Jan 2021

476 mins (228) v Sri Lanka, Jan 2021

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Teammates, coaches and close observers have spoken about his increased hunger for runs following of a 2020 in which, for the first time in his Test career, he went a full calendar year without making a hundred, while he also slipped outside the top 10 of the ICC's Test batting rankings.

In January, before he had played a single Test innings for the year, he spoke presciently at a press conference.

"I feel my game is in a really good place, and that something big is around the corner," he said.

"In terms of motivation, there's plenty there for me to go out and produce some big scores.

"In terms of conversion rate, it's a mental thing – I have to make sure when I get to 50, I get greedy, selfish and make those starts count.

"I have to keep working hard to get in those positions, knowing I'm a good enough player to turn them into match-winning contributions."

There is a technical twist to all this, too. Most obviously, there has been a reversion to his slight back-and-across trigger movement, as opposed to merely stepping back. But across the past two years, Ponting's expert eye has observed more.

"In the last (Ashes) series, Pat (Cummins) and Josh (Hazlewood), they were all over him," the Australian says. "His footwork pattern was a bit early – he was trying to create time (by) moving early, and when you move early as a batsman, sometimes you actually give yourself less time.

"That was something that I always battled as well, because I had quite a pronounced forward-and-across movement onto my front foot, and at the back-end of my career, that was something that I was always trying to delay.

"If you look at what Joe's done now, he's actually not moving as much, and moving a little bit later. By doing that, he's creating more time for himself. His pickup is a lot better now, and he's in a better position when the ball is released."

This year's version was in fact borne initially from the failures of 2020, which Root was able to learn from through a process of experimentation.

"Throughout lockdown, and having that extra bit of time away from the game, (I was) looking at areas that I can improve, trying to look at trends of how I've been getting out at different points in my innings and seeing if there were ways and areas in which I could just tighten things up slightly," he explains.

"That gave me a bit of clarity about how I want to do things, how I want to score my runs.

"I made some technical changes, which didn't actually work, but by making those changes, when I went back to how I wanted to play, it gave me real clarity on what was really successful and where I wanted to score my runs, and what were the dangers and what weren't.

"So now that's proven in English conditions and in subcontinent conditions that that's paid off. And it'd be really nice to hopefully now follow through and finish the year strong in Australian conditions, too."

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Most Test runs in a calendar year (England)

Michael Vaughan 2002 | 1,481 runs in 14 matches | 6x100s | Ave: 61.70 | HS: 197

Joe Root 2016 | 1,477 runs in 17 matches | 3x100s | Ave 49.23 | HS 254

Jonny Bairstow 2016 | 1,470 runs in 17 matches | 3x100s | Ave: 58.80 | HS: 167no

Joe Root 2021 | 1,455 runs in 12 matches | 6x100s | Ave: 66.13 | HS: 228

Joe Root 2015 | 1,385 runs in 14 matches | 3x100s | Ave: 60.21 | HS: 182no

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Root is cagey around offering too many details on his plan of attack in Australia ("it's difficult – you don't want to give too much away, do you, at the start of a series") but broadly speaking he wants to "marry up" the tweaks we have already seen to the conditions and the attack he will face, with a focus on fast-bowling lengths, the bounce those lengths create, and finding a way to stay on top of the ball.

Ponting has no hesitation in saying the technique Root has landed on in 2021 can work for him in Australia, but the former skipper, who led Australia twice in England for two defeats, knows that is but one of a multitude of factors when it comes to having success in the Ashes.

"I think the changes will stand up anywhere in the world, because it's made him a better player already," he says.

"But you've also got to see those changes against the best, and if you look at the best bowling attacks in the world right now, Hazlewood and Cummins will be two of the first names that anyone talks about.

"He's going to know when he turns up that Cummins and Hazlewood were all over him last time, and he's going to have to make sure that under that pressure, he can still make all those trigger movements and make the right decisions.

"It's how you react, how your thinking allows your body to move. If he's tight, if he's under pressure, then his movements won't be as good as if he's 60 or 70 not out and freewheeling.

"And there's no doubt as a captain, as their best player, more and more pressure is going to come on him.

"There's probably more pressure on him now than ever because he hasn't got the class of player around him that he's had on other tours as well … (and) if their top order doesn't get off to a good start early in the series, more and more pressure mounts on him.

"So we'll see if the technical changes stand up under that sort of scrutiny."

This month, Root has been scrutinised more closely than ever, though not as a batter, but a person, courtesy of the racism scandal that has engulfed English cricket, amid which former Yorkshire off-spinner Azeem Rafiq told a parliamentary hearing "I lost my career to racism".

Root played with Rafiq at Yorkshire and was housemates with Gary Ballance, who was accused of using regular racial slurs towards Rafiq.

Following those allegations, Root said he could not recall any instances of racist abuse at Yorkshire, to which Rafiq responded: "Rooty is a good man – he's never engaged in racist language. (But) I found (his comments) hurtful. He was Gary's flatmate. He was involved in social nights out during which I was called a P**i. He might not remember (any incidents of racism) but it shows how normal it was, that even a good man like him doesn't see it for what it is."

During a press conference last week, the England captain said he and Rafiq had "exchanged a couple of messages since … and hopefully when we finish this tour we'll get the opportunity to sit down and talk about this whole situation, about how we can move the game forward."

How the scandal, and Rafiq's reaction to his words, has truly affected Root remains largely unknown (the ECB made the topic off limits in this interview), but there is no question it adds another layer to the pressures Ponting discusses.

And so ahead of the Gabba Test, the same 'ifs' linger. If he can quiet his mind in the middle, if he can apply his game plan against what he calls a "brilliant" Australian attack, that bumper series Root craves might well come to fruition. It is one he has been thinking about his entire career, and one he thought he might have missed for good when he was dropped from the Test team in Sydney eight years ago.

"That was the first time I've been left out of an England team," he recalls. "It was really difficult to take. And at that stage, you don't know if you're going to play again."

Root realised on that tour he was fixated on improving his game while he was batting, instead of focusing on the moment. He concerned himself with the size of his stride forward instead of getting under Mitchell Johnson bouncers, and he forgot to trust his strengths and put pressure back on the bowlers instead of merely looking to survive.

But the biggest takeaway for him was about desire.

"That was a big learning curve for me," he remembers. "Those are the moments where you learn a little bit about yourself, and I really wanted it – I really wanted to get better.

"Thankfully, I've got a third opportunity now to come back here and hopefully improve on what I've done previously.

"With experience, and off the back of the year I've had so far, I feel like I'm in a really good place to hopefully get the best out of myself."

And turn the nightmares of Ashes past into the stuff of dreams.

Vodafone Men's Ashes

Squads

Australia: Pat Cummins (c), Steve Smith (vc), Alex Carey, Cameron Green, Josh Hazlewood, Marcus Harris, Travis Head, Usman Khawaja, Marnus Labuschagne, Nathan Lyon, Michael Neser, Jhye Richardson, Mitchell Starc, Mitchell Swepson, David Warner

England: Joe Root (c), James Anderson, Jonathan Bairstow, Dom Bess, Stuart Broad, Rory Burns, Jos Buttler, Zak Crawley, Haseeb Hameed, Dan Lawrence, Jack Leach, Dawid Malan, Craig Overton, Ollie Pope, Ollie Robinson, Ben Stokes, Chris Woakes, Mark Wood

Schedule

First Test: December 8-12, The Gabba

Second Test: December 16-20, Adelaide Oval

Third Test: December 26-30, MCG

Fourth Test: January 5-9, SCG

Fifth Test: January 14-18, Perth Stadium