Root makes record-breaking 34th Test ton on day of domination

The first person to bat alongside Joe Root in a Test match did not take long to make his assessment. At stumps on December 13, 2012 in Nagpur, Kevin Pietersen said: “You can never judge a batsman after just a couple of hours at the crease but he [Root] showed signs that he could have a good Test career. He is a good little player.” Root was 31 not out at the time and went on to make 73 the next day.
Root was no doubt annoyed not to convert that score into a century but in recent times he has become a modern master of the art.
For a long time, Root, always a supreme technician, struggled to make as many Test hundreds as his talent warranted but he has turned that problem around spectacularly, and here, on an otherwise routine day of English domination over Sri Lanka, Root reached the top of the pile of England batsman with a 34th hundred, one clear of Sir Alastair Cook.
Radio microphone in hand, Cook was on air for the moment at 3.05pm when Root stepped back to leg to flat-bat Lahiru Kumara through the covers to move to 102. Sri Lanka’s seamers had been frustrating him with a diet of leg-side bumpers, which was the primary reason that he took 16 balls to get through the nineties, but he was not to be denied for ever.
Despite the late spoiling tactics, this was still, at 111 balls, the fastest of all Root’s hundreds (five faster than his one at Trent Bridge two years ago), a fact that would have pleased him as much as anything as the situation required England to bat purposefully before getting to work with the ball. A full house of 31,000 rose as one to salute him, Root’s proud father, Matt, among them.
It was not quite 48 hours since Root had drawn level with Cook with a first-innings score of 143. It is a double that places him in special company among the makers of twin centuries in Lord’s Tests alongside George Headley, Graham Gooch and Michael Vaughan.
He now stands clear of Gooch and Vaughan with seven Test hundreds at this most famous of venues, and it caps an emotional week in which Root has given heartfelt tributes to the late Graham Thorpe, his most influential mentor.
Cook, who until this week had been the standalone record-holder since seven days before Root’s debut, was full of praise in his tribute to Root. “It was only a matter of time,” he said. “The record wasn’t going to stand for ever. He is quite simply England’s greatest and it is absolutely right he has the record. We are watching a genius.”
As if this was not enough, Root at first slip went on to take his 199th and 200th catches in Tests as England’s seamers probed for breakthroughs when grim light allowed.
When it did not, Root had to take the ball in tandem with Shoaib Bashir to keep play going. It was a busy day for England cricket’s knight-to-be.
Operating steadfastly and unimaginatively to an attack of three seamers and the milkable left-arm spin of Prabath Jayasuriya — Kamindu Mendis’s ambidextrous spin was left on the shelf — Sri Lanka never looked like they had much idea how to keep Root quiet once Ben Duckett, smartly caught via a parried catch between gully and slip, and Ollie Pope had departed in the first hour.
Pope fell to a sucker punch, carving the first short ball he faced from Asitha Fernando to deep point to extend his poor run to 40 runs in his past five Test innings. He now averages 25 in 21 Tests against Asian opposition.
England’s intentions were clear as Harry Brook and Jamie Smith, in partnerships of 58 and 44 with Root, focused intently on the positive options. Against Jayasuriya, Brook, hitting high into the deep, was let off once but not the second time, while Smith was trapped by an arm-ball, but Root busily took the spinner for 60 of his 103 runs.
He gave the reverse-ramp an outing against Milan Rathnayake on 69, missed, then put it away for good. His virtual parking of this indulgent shot since it brought an infamous dismissal in Rajkot in February is one illustration of his constant reappraisal of risk and reward: in seven subsequent Tests he averages 88.
Root’s great talent, of course, beyond innate ability, is an insatiable appetite for improvement, never being satisfied with mere excellence if he can find ways to refine aspects of his game that already work well.
Perhaps the most significant of all his decisions was to use the early downtime during Covid to improve his physical endurance after he concluded that this was the likeliest cause of him getting out so often between 50 and 100. There certainly seemed to be no technical pattern to his dismissals during this phase.
The change was dramatic: before the end of 2020, Root had scored 17 hundreds and 49 fifties in 177 innings; since then, his figures are 17 hundreds and 15 fifties in 88 innings, a doubling of the frequency with which he converts half-centuries to centuries, and with which he scores hundreds in terms of visits to the crease. His resignation as captain in early 2022 barely disturbed his equilibrium.
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Can he overtake Sachin Tendulkar’s 51 hundreds? Root’s hunger to keep going is hardly in question. He is 33 and probably needs another four years of Test cricket to get there. What is less certain is his fitness: his back, which needs regular massage, and a right knee that is currently being supported by heavy strapping (he could be seen adjusting it when his score was in the thirties) may be more problematic. He needs 3,545 to pass Tendulkar’s 15,921 runs.
The main threat to him reaching the record was losing four partners in ten overs. When Olly Stone walked out at No 10, Root was unbeaten on 88 and after a brief chat they concluded that Root would manage the strike, turning down singles until late in the over. Even so, Stone was required to survive 15 balls before Root got there; one wild heave at Jayasuriya in particular must have given his partner palpitations.
Stone was out four balls after Root’s hundred and Root himself soon followed, top-edging a swing to leg, but by then the lead was 482 and England’s bowlers were ready to get to work. There were 40 overs left in the day but the overcast skies meant that only half of that was possible. Even so, a fifth straight win beckons.