Nine hundreds in eighteen months – Root’s golden run keeps going
Joe Root’s first fourth-innings Test hundred sealed victory for England in the first game of the Ben Stokes-Brendon McCullum era.
His hundred brought a sense of calm and order to an otherwise chaotic Test match that – with a handful of exceptions – saw wickets tumble at a rollicking pace; he helped England recover from 69-4 to chase down 277 with five wickets in hand.
It was a notable day in many respects for the former Test captain as he become just the second England cricketer to pass 10,000 Test runs and fourteenth overall. Remarkably, he became the joint-youngest player to reach the milestone, achieving it at exactly the same age as Sir Alastair Cook did at 31 years and 157 days.
In terms of innings batted, Root reached the landmark in 218 innings – making him the tenth fastest to achieve the feat. He did so in just one more innings than Jacques Kallis, who passed 10,000 Test runs in his 217th innings. Root also became the first player to reach 10,000 Test runs within a decade of their Test debut.
Root’s century was his ninth in an extraordinary 18-month streak stretching back to the start of 2021 – the same number Jonathan Trott, Stephen Fleming, Gautam Gambhir and Ted Dexter each registered across the entirety of their Test careers. In that run, Root has notched nine of the 14 hundreds scored by England batters. In home Tests, Rory Burns is the only other Englishman to score a Test hundred since the start of last summer. It was also his fifth century at the Home of Cricket, a tally only bettered by two of his fellow former England captains, Graham Gooch and Michael Vaughan.
England’s chase of 277 was their second-highest successful run chase at Lord’s, falling just short of the 282 they chased down against the same opposition back in 2004. It was just England’s 11th ever successful run chase in excess of 275. The victory also ended England’s recent winless run against the Black Caps. Prior to the Lord’s Test, England have gone three series without registering a win over Kane Williamson’s side. The win lifts England off the bottom of the World Test Championship table.
