Joe Root returns to serene best, shedding Bazball pretenses and embracing good old grind of Test cricket | Cricket News
The day that began with a debutant making his mark on the big stage ended with a 139-Test-old virtuoso batsman twing the script of the game to his will. If Akash Deep’s verve and maturity enthralled the motley spectators in the first session, Joe Root’s exhibition of classical Test match batting engrossed them in the next two sessions. When the day ended, crisp sunshine making way for somber skies, the match was shivering on a knife’s edge.
The visitors will, probably, be the happier side. From 112/5, the tally of 302/7 would have seemed an impossible ascent. Until Root, ridiculed and rebuked for his intemperance this series, seized control of the day, the match seemed another lost cause for England. But greatness has a knack of emerging from nothingness. The Root on Friday was not the Root of Rajkot, Visakhapatnam or Hyderabad. This was the world-conquering batsman that has marveled you. This was the Root that India had known all too well — no batsman ever has scored as many hundreds as Root against India—and wished would never resurface. But this was not to be.
This was quintessential Root, breathing serenity, exhaling belief, a man in absolute control of the situation and conditions, and fully aware of the path forward. He shed the Bazball pretenses and embraced the good old grind. The single that brought in his half-century was off the 108th ball he had faced. It’s the number of balls his colleagues usually rattle hundreds off. The cover-driven four that ushered in his 31st hundred — and one of his finest — was just his ninth of the day and off his 219th ball. In a way he was battling against himself — the old and new versions, the steady and spectacular iterations. In the end, he beat himself.
Joe Root’s restrained knock
But even a restrained knock was sprinkled with glorious strokes. The shot that fully conveyed the range of Root was a late cut off Akash Deep. He hung back on the back foot to a hard-length ball, waited for the ball to reach him, waited as though to defend or leave, and then when it reached him, veering into his body, he merely opened the face of his bat and guided the ball past first slip. The time at his disposal baffled — the impression he transmits to bowlers when he is in his zen, when he is not seized the improvisation bug.
It was only late into his 70s that he attempted a reverse sweep. The scoop variant — that triggered widespread ire in Rajkot — was put on the back burner. Here was the more classical and peaceful avatar, the masterful all-condition batsman, and not the confused impersonator. He sucked the pressure, blunted the spinners, and drained the energy and belief of the Indians, with the ease of plucking a flower, with frictionless grace. This was a task only someone with the expertise of Root could have accomplished, and he performed it with aplomb.
Should England salvage something from this game or series, this would be the equivalent of Alastair Cook’s hundred in Kolkata. Root had watched the innings, though from the dressing room. Like Cook, Root drove them into committing errors. India’s intensity on the field would drop. Misfields and easy runs followed.
One of Root’s methods was unusual but effective. He moved his feet according to the line and not the length, going back if the ball was outside the off-stump and going forward if it landed on the stumps. It was a pragmatic survival tactic to neuter uneven bounce. Committing to back-foot offers no protection from low-bounced balls pitched in line with the stump. But playing on the front foot, and standing a mile outside the crease, he could reduce the lbw potential. In case the ball kicked up and took his edge, the slowness of the pitch would mean the nick doesn’t possess the impetus to travel to the fielders. Ben Foakes gave him stoic company with a 113-run stand.
When Root batted as smoothly as he did, the pitch too turned benevolent. So much so that the two-faced pitch possessed two natures too. One was vile and nasty, as though someone had durbed its sleep. The other was largely benign and slothful. In the morning session, the ball leapt off the good-length area, as though someone had pricked a water packet. Mohammed Siraj would bowl a helmet-sniffer at Zak Crawley, when the batsman was expecting to contact the ball hip high. From a similar length, the ball would skid thigh-high. The session ended with an ominous grubber from Ravindra Jadeja to Ben Stokes, who didn’t even sniff around for the umpire to raise his index finger.
Post lunch, though, as though content of the damage it had inflicted, the pitch dozed off. The cracks lost their sting. Variable bounce was less pronounced; batting suddenly became hazardless. bowlers sneered in anguish; the crowd searched for vacant chairs to stretch their limbs. If the first session moved along frenetically like an action thriller, the second slow-burned like an arthouse movie. The first hour, especially, was a blur of nudges and deflections, blocks and straight defensive blades, 49 runs trickled from 20 overs. Bazball seemed snatched in a time warp.
For those expecting a hasty finish to the day, the session was an engrossing anticlimax. It was predictable — the sun would suck out the moure, stripping the pitch off its skid, making it drier and slower; the ball, as it wears on, would lose its bite. A first-session, new ball wicket it seems to be. Or Root made it look like one.
