Record-breaker Root always 'felt different' - Finn

It has been a matter of ‘when’ not ‘if’ Joe Root would beat Sir Alastair Cook’s England Test run-scoring record.

This air of inevitability has been looming for the last 10 years and finally, with a century in the first Test against Pakistan in Multan, he cruised past with plenty left in the tank.

I first bowled properly at Joe Root at the old stadium in Ahmedabad in 2012, before the massive Narendra Modi Stadium was built. He was a 21-year-old on his first England tour and I had been in the England side for more than two years.

This was the famous series when we beat India 2-1, the last time they lost at home. I had torn my quad on the first day of a warm-up game in Mumbai and was making my way back to fitness, building up my workload in the nets.

The recovery was going well. I was just about up to full pace and decided to pick a ball that would reverse swing as a confidence booster, to take a few wickets and get the bounce in my run-up going. I always felt as though I attacked the crease and committed to the motion of bowling much better when the ball was reversing.

I would predominantly swing the ball away from right-handers when the ball was reverse-swinging, to drag them and their head across their crease and to threaten the outside edge, then bowl an effort-ball inswinger when the batter was least expecting it. At the time I was capable of bowling upwards of 90mph and could rush some of the best players in the world.

I was dragging Root across the crease, moving his head outside off stump and then tried my first inswinger. He played it with perfect balance, eyes level, under his nose to mid-on as though he had telepathically read what I was trying to do.

For such a young player, he just felt different.

We continued this battle for the rest of the net. I would try to hide the ball, switching it in my hand as I was loading up. I may have even tried ‘marginally’ over-stepping to try to beat him for pace.

It didn’t matter. He played me serenely for the rest of the net.

This isn’t to say playing me bowling well is a litmus test for being a good batter, far from it. But, from a bowler’s point of view, you get a real sense of how good a batter is when you’re bowling at them in the nets.

It is a tight, enclosed space. More balls are bowled in a shorter space of time than during a game. It can be intense. A bowler gets an inclination of when a batter is a good player and Root certainly stood out from any other young batter I had bowled to at the time.

Root arrived into a successful team. We won the Ashes in Australia and had been ranked number one in the world. There were some big names in there: Cook, Ian Bell, Kevin Pietersen, Graeme Swann, Stuart Broad, James Anderson and Matt Prior.

He was not overawed. Instead, he was immediately cheeky. The Joe Root grin we have seen so often throughout the past 12 years was there every day of his first tour. He played pranks and got stuck into the environment as though he was someone who was going to be in that dressing room for a long time.

The only time that smile evaded him was towards the end of his captaincy tenure. Thankfully it returned straight after.

A sign of how good a person Root is, is how he settled back into the ranks once his great mate Ben Stokes took over the captaincy.

Even though it was clear he wanted to carry on as skipper after the West Indies series of 2022, Root doubled down on the style of play Stokes wanted to use. The message that sent to the dressing room would have been huge and one of the reasons the changeover of captaincy was so seamless.

Root has always had an ability to adapt and evolve. He is never satisfied and never stands still.

For everything which comes naturally to him, like the straight-bat punch off the back foot through backward point, there are other things he has had to work at in order to survive and excel, especially in foreign conditions: rotating the strike from spin off both front and back foot, becoming so selective about how and when he plays his sweeps (not to be confused with reverse scoops). It is not a stretch to say he is renowned as the best batter in the world in sub-continental conditions for visiting teams from outside of Asia.

Root has an insatiable hunger for runs. When he gets an opportunity to go big, he will rarely throw it away.

He had troubles early in his career converting fifties to hundreds. Those experiences have made him realise the opportunity to score centuries doesn’t just grow on trees. You can see the concentration and determination in his eyes when he is not willing to leave any runs out there.

In his first 97 Tests he scored 17 hundreds and 49 fifties. In the 49 Tests up to this series he scored 17 hundreds and 15 fifties. A quite remarkable conversion rate.

The next statistical aim for Root is Sachin Tendulkar’s all-time Test run-scoring record of 15,921. Root is only 33 and at his current rate of scoring it would take him 38 Tests to overhaul The Little Master.

It is not inconceivable this feat could be completed within three years. Root has been bullish about not being close to satisfied at merely surpassing Cook, and that he has many more Test runs in his sights. It is a comforting thought for England fans.

Psychologically, he may consider a stack of runs in a successful away Ashes series win as the prize to top off a magnificent career.

In Australia, Root averages 35.68 with no hundreds. He has played in some horror shows of series Down Under and might be grateful to catch Mitchell Starc, Josh Hazlewood and Pat Cummins well into their 30s down under next winter.

England’s greatest ever batter has two more peaks to conquer. He isn’t done yet.