In his introduction for the new edition of Wisden Cricket Monthly – out now – Phil Walker welcomes the the start of England's build-up to their home summer, with New Zealand rolling into town and all freaks welcome.
An email arrives with a fabulous title. It’s from a chap called Matthew, an Aussie expat whom I see from time to time in south London, generally lurking around unkempt nets with a bat slung over his shoulder. He’s Not a Freak it reads. It’s partly about Joe Root, whom I must have described somewhere or other as a “freak”. But it’s also about others – Steve Smith, Virat Kohli are mentioned – who more readily incapsulate for Matthew what the word means.
He cites Smith’s 774 runs in the 2019 Ashes, against a beery backdrop of post-sandpaper moralising from English punters, "booing him 18 hours a day for two months”. That performance, he writes, was freakish. Kohli’s 28 hundreds chasing in ODIs, leading to 24 wins, also qualifies. These are ‘adults only’ players, writes Matthew jauntily, “freak players you leave your kids at home to watch by yourself.” (If nothing else, that’s a smashing line.) He adds that these two, Smith and Kohli, are the ‘next level’ players – the ones who do the "no other player in the world can do this" stuff. Joe is "very, very good," Matthew concludes, but he’s no freak.
It’s all good and harmless fun course. But still it speaks to how Root the cricketer is understood outside of England. Perhaps the orderliness of his game hints, misleadingly, at a slightly soulless player. He doesn’t scare you. He's not dangerous. He doesn’t test the extremes of his ball-striking ability like a Harry Brook, or indeed like any number of franchise hitters, whose claims to freakishness are seriously undermined by the sheer volume of them essentially doing the same thing.
He is foremost a technician whose strokeplay may be beautiful, but for whom the aesthetic only comes after he’s done the maths. The artistry is largely a useful bi-product of how he bats, though it is worth recalling his love for visual art before we throw out the notion that he’s unmotivated by style. He is not beautiful in the Gower sense, with all its delicate fallibilities. His footwork is too precise, the mind too sharp. He possesses none of Smith’s technical idiosyncrasies, of the kind that makes him strange and inexplicable – where the freaks kick around, perhaps. And as he said to me last month, Root has little desire to take a walk in Kohli’s shoes.
But if we’re talking about the stuff that no one else has done, which by definition push him to the edges of our understanding, then Root is squarely in the conversation. In January 2021, almost a year into the pandemic, he took a nervy England squad to Asia to play six Test matches. Some were okay to be there, others most definitely weren’t. A second year of bio-secure bubbles encouraged a form of paranoia. Players were drafted in and pulled out. The IPL played its hand. One week he would lose Moeen Ali, the next it would be Jos Buttler. His men were going mad. Against that, Root made two double-hundreds and a 186.
The next summer was more of the same. No one could score a run. Players were prevented from seeing their families for weeks on end, and England kept losing cricket matches. When the India team stepped away from the final Test match at Old Trafford just hours before it was due to start, no one had the energy to put up a fight. The game staggered on in a haze. Against that, Root made three hundreds and averaged 66.
His captaincy effectively ran aground that winter, after a truly harrowing few months in Australia. He finally resigned in early 2022, gaunt and sad, finishing up with one Test win in 17. From the start of 2021 to the end of his tenure 15 months later, England’s Test team managed 13 Test hundreds. Root hit eight of them. It’s one of the great individual performances in the game’s history. Freakishly good.
After freeing himself from the burden of leadership, he snuck back in the ranks to play under Ben Stokes. New Zealand were the tourists four years ago, slipping in after a messy Ashes to find English cricket undergoing its latest repair job, much as they had in 2015, when Root and Stokes, as kids, got together at Lord’s to clear away the debris from the post-Pietersen era. That Test match, with Root’s 98 and 84 and Stokes’ wild hundred in the second innings before landing his one-two of Kane Williamson and, yes, Brendon McCullum on the last day, remains one of my favourite ever Test matches.
You may recall that Stokes’ first match as full-time skipper, also at Lord’s, was an uneven affair. McCullum spent his first week in the job trying to convince his boys that his way was the way. In the end, it needed a nerveless fourth-innings hundred from their champion to get the win. Without it, McCullum’s tenure would have stalled in the driveway.
A week later the teams went to Trent Bridge. New Zealand put on 553. England replied with 539. Root: 186. Since turning 30, he has made 24 tons in 66 matches. Let’s just say that’s not normal and leave it at that.
And so here we are again, ushering in another international summer with our most elegant guests. New Zealand have a proper seam attack, with enough wicket-taking power to win the series. England have named three uncapped players in their squad of 15, and there’s a deliciously contentious recall of Ollie Robinson, described this week by Rob Key as “one of the world’s best”. In the new issue of Wisden Cricket Monthly, we speak in depth with Robinson, one of three England interviews to feature inside, along with Jamie Smith and their latest opening batter, Emilio Gay. The circus is back in town. All freaks welcome.
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