Every cricket team ends up reflecting the character of its leader, and the England Test side is now Joe Root’s to fashion around his. The Australian writer Adam Collins travelled up to Sheffield to meet a very English virtuoso.
Joe Root was visiting Dore Primary School to launch Yorkshire Tea National Cricket Week with Chance to Shine. This year it ran Monday 19th – Friday 23rd June.
The Captain Class by Sam Walker is a new book that measures what he describes as “the hidden force that creates the world’s greatest teams”.
The “one emphatic conclusion” the author arrives at after 11 years’ obsessive chronicling of sporting dynasties back to the 1880s is that “the most crucial ingredient in a team that achieves and sustains historic greatness is the character of the player who leads it”.
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Top of the bounce. Balls of his feet. Punching past point. The ball slamming into the rope, barely having left the floor. The degree of difficulty of all this is deceptively high, yet it looks effortless. Adored by purists, relished by the rest. With Joe Root, it is all a bit too easy.
The best batsman in his country, part of the most accomplished quartet of stylists in the world, appointed captain of England weeks after his 26th birthday. By any cricketing measure, he didn’t just win the lottery of life, he put the proceeds into Apple stock in 2003.
But psychological wounds are less pronounced for both sides, with so much regeneration since last they met. This isn’t Clarke and Johnson and Haddin. It may not even be Jimmy Anderson. It’s the summer where Generation Next has morphed into Generation Now, the teams led by two legitimate matchwinners, each contesting their first Ashes Test in charge.
Through it all, we may see sides prepared to play with blood spilled on the pitch, but also a deep appreciation of each other’s talents. This generation has cricketers aware that you don’t have to be a bastard to be tough. That the nimblest minds are as dangerous as the broadest blades. For that, England have their totem in Joe Root. If he can chart a course to victory on Australian shores, at the first time of asking, save a place for him in Sam Walker’s next edition.
