Barney Ronay
The backstop
annoying, presence. I felt bad about this.
Everyone else liked him and said he was
refreshing. The ECB kept suggesting he
was really great for marketing and that
kids loved him.
What I saw was the ultimate ECB
insider, the most aggressively hot-housed
head prefect of a professional cricketer,
an entire life lived within the blue Lycra
machine. As a 16-year-old, Root drew
a picture of a spaceship taking off and
wrote “I realised today I would become a
world-class batsman”. I know. Vomit!
His batting is, of course, really excellent.
To watch Root is to find a player operating
constantly at his own high-grade rhythm,
so full of craft in the way he leans back
and guides and cuffs and coaxes balls
other batsmen might lunge at, a man
whose bat face is like a living extension
of the palm of his hand.
That captaincy, though. At times it felt
like my man was right, that Root really
hadn’t thought about it until the day it
was duly handed down. England captains
are supposed to be desperate. We
remember, with fondness, the ancient,
stoic pain of Mike Atherton.
This current England team lost seven
of 10 Test matches and it didn’t really
matter much. Root as captain just felt
like another modern England cricket
moment, with that familiar sense of an
industry folding in on itself.
But then, things have changed. Defeat
to Pakistan at Lord’s arrived, followed by
Headingley and victory and a sense of a
shift. Root has looked genuinely frazzled
at times. The job has begun to work to
him. Obligations and elements of pay-
back have started to stack up. Root has
to win in Australia now. It is his point of
redemption from here. Before that there
are knots in the team to untangle, some
final reckoning-up with the Anderson–
Broad industrial complex.
Root will not be able to save Test
cricket. But all the greatest game really
needs is for people to feel terminally
snagged, unsettled and dragged in
irretrievably. This is an England cricketer
installed a little easily as a modern great,
who now looks to have found his pain,
his scar. A glut of runs wouldn’t hurt from
here. But for now Root does at least look
to be asking the right questions, to have
become, perhaps for the first time, an
invigoratingly vulnerable figure..Root has found his cause at last
I have a favourite colleague when it comes
to the terrible business, the shared lost
hours of sporting press conferences. This
bloke asks good questions. Or at least the
ones you’re not supposed to ask at all.
A few years back we were at a darts
thing listening to Phil ‘The Power’ Taylor
talk with endless burbling zeal about the
amazing miracle weight-loss regime that
would be sending him into the World
Championships more toned and tanned
and athletic than ever before. As we
stood in awkward silence at the end of
this, not wanting to meet the eye of the
standard triple-chinned darts wreck in
front of us, an innocent voice finally piped
up. “So when does that all start then?”
Taylor swore and jabbed his finger
and looked, briefly, like he wanted to hit
someone. He still won the darts. And
memories of his jowly funk came back
last year in India during a hotel lobby
‘sit-down’ with Joe Root.
After a few minutes of chat someone
asked if Root had done much planning
for when he became England captain,
as he clearly would once Alastair Cook
had gone. None at all, Joe announced
triumphantly, flourishing a dead bat
straight from the media management
A–Z. Hadn’t given it a moment’s thought.
He was instead taking each micro-second
of animate reality as it comes.
Everyone nodded as though thatwas just fine, or indeed true. Then the
innocent voice appeared again. “Sorry
Joe. Just so I understand. You haven’t
thought about it. For one second. You
might be England captain next week and
you haven’t spoken to anyone about this.
Or made any plans at all. Don’t you think
you should?”
And so on. This didn’t make the papers.
But it is pretty much the only bit of
that tour I can remember now, apartfrom Trevor Bayliss refusing to take
off his sunhat at any stage, appearing
suddenly in press conferences or at
the airport looking like a reclusive rural
beekeeper dragged away from his hives
to address a convention of professional
nuisance-callers.
The point, anyway, was about Root.
I feel like I can say this now. But I used to
find him an unsympathetic, even quiteAbove
‘The shared lost
hours’ of sporting
press conferences
What I saw in Root was the
ultimate ECB insider, the most
aggressively hot-housed
head prefect of a professional
cricketer, a life lived within
the blue Lycra machine
RYANPIERSE/G
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