Not so long ago, Joe Root achieved a historic feat in Test cricket when he became the second top scorer in the history of Test cricket standing just behind Sachin Tendulkar. In his recent interview, Root described that feeling as “pinch yourself moment” after he scored 150 against India in the ongoing Manchester Test
In Multan last year, he became England’s all-time top run scorer, but Root has continuously downplayed the importance of the records he has set in recent years. He did, however, acknowledge that it was “pretty cool” to see his name close to the top of a list of hitters he aspired to be like as a youngster.
“When you look at the names there on that list, they are all people that, as a kid growing up, that’s who I would try to be in the garden, on the street, on the driveway, at my local club,” Root told Sky Sports. “One day I’d try to be Ricky Ponting, the next I’d try to be Kumar Sangakkara or Brian Lara.
“I’d pretend that I was in different parts of the world, scoring Test-match hundreds. Even just to be mentioned in the same sentence as these guys is a bit of a pinch-yourself moment. It is pretty cool, yeah.”
Root played against Tendulkar only once in his career, that too on his Test debut in Nagpur in 2012, and is now closer to his record tally than any batter in history. “It’s not something that I will focus on,” he told the BBC. “Those sorts of things should look after themselves. The focus has to be about winning games.
“He made his Test debut before I was born. To be playing on the same ground as him and to get the chance to play against him was incredibly cool. [He was] someone you grew up watching, admiring, trying to learn from… To get to play in a series where he was still playing was really quite a memorable experience that I’ll never forget.”
Root claimed he had attempted to keep his record out of his mind and only fleetingly noted the standing ovation for the track that propelled him beyond Ponting on Friday.
“I can’t avoid it,” he joked. “They [the numbers] are everywhere, aren’t they? But you try to put it out of your mind. It is easy to get caught up in this stuff… You’re not doing your job if you’re concentrating on yourself.”
He added: “It’s something that I’ll look back on at the end of my career rather than right now… It was a really cool day, something I’ll try to take in properly and appreciate what I’ve achieved, but there’s so much important cricket still to be playing within this series, within this game, and obviously in the next little while, so that’s the main focus right now.”
Since the Covid-19 epidemic, Root has excelled as a batsman, averaging 55.33 over the past five years and scoring 21 of his 38 hundreds. He claimed to have analyzed his batting during the unplanned pause and to have played the game “slightly differently” ever since.
“For the start of my career, a lot of [my approach] was based on my technique: where my hands are, where my head is, am I lined up, is my trigger right? Whereas in this second phase of things, it’s been more about managing risk, and thinking, ‘how can I eliminate as many modes of dismissal as possible, with the highest output?’
“It does come through experience; it comes from trial and error [and] from getting things wrong. You’ve got to see the game for what it is. It’s very easy to get caught up, get too emotional, either get too hard on yourself or feel too sorry for yourself. You’ve got to see it for what it is, be very honest about it, and then just try to put that into practice.”
