Did Joe Root pay the price for his teammates performances?
The Pot overboiled for the English cricket, and the skipper Joe Root finally stepped down from the test captaincy. Everyone could see it coming, given England’s performances in the test cricket in the last couple of years.
While England are already searching for their next test skipper, do they have a better option than the Yorkshire batter? Joe Root has been easily the best performer in the English team for years now. However, he was let down by his teammates and their below-par performances big time.
Moreover, the ECB’s extended focus on the Hundred and the white-ball team has scarred the English domestic county system. In fact, Joe Root didn’t have enough world-class talent at his disposal to compete against the best at the international level.
A look at the Joe Root’s numbers as the captain
Joe Root finished his test captaincy stint as the most successful English skipper of all time with 27 wins under his belt. He led England in 64 tests with 27 wins, 26 losses, and 11 draws. However, his captaincy stint was marred with failures against India in the home series, a recent loss to West Indies, and dismal Ashes performances.
England played 10 test matches on the Australian soil without winning even a single test, losing 8, and two games ended as a stalemate. Unfortunately, the record gets no better on the home soil as England won only two games, lost two, and drew one under the leadership of Joe Root.
Joe Root’s numbers says different story
The answer is a big no. Root ended his stint as the leading run-scoring English captain of all time. The right-handed batter amassed a total of 5295 runs in 64 Tests at an average of 46.44. Moreover, no other English batter has scored more runs than Root during this period.
Joe Root’s numbers since 2021 have been phenomenal as the former English skipper has scored a total of 1175 runs in 12 test matches during the ICC Test Championship 2021-23 cycle. He has scored a whopping 424 runs extra than the 2nd batter on the list.
If truth to be told, Joe Root had a mediocre team. Since the retirement of Sir Andrew Strauss and Sir Alastair Cook, England haven’t had a settled opening unit. In fact, England have had one of the worst-performing top three in the world in recent years.
Also, England lack a world-class spinner who could provide breakthroughs while holding one end to build the pressure on one end. Joe Root didn’t have reliable resources on the bench to fall upon. There is a scarcity of world-class talent in the English test cricket at the moment and Joe Root’s captaincy stint caught between it. He tried his best to defy the situation as much as possible through his bat, but England were exposed to world-class teams like Australia and India.
Root’s resignation from captaincy is going to change nothing in the English test cricket. They can appoint superman as their skipper but even will fail to bring them success until England address the core issues.
The problem lies in the domestic county test structure, and they have to scrap the old system. They can’t keep applying a band-aid to a fracture. As far as Joe Root is concerned, one can expect him to pile up more runs with the bat as if he wasn’t scoring enough already.
