3 minute read
Remember when Joe Root was England’s permanent Test captain? Remember Joe Root Burnout Watch? He did another three years after that and things got worse. That kind of experience will scar a man.
Way back in the mists of time, several years before half the world’s wealth had been funneled into a handful of massively, massively unprofitable AI companies, Joe Root was England’s full-time Test captain.
The year was 2019 and our Joe had the unenviable task of captaining a wobbly England team through five Ashes Tests in six and a half weeks, while also batting at three, 18 days after a gruelling World Cup campaign that they’d been building towards for four years.
Root started out looking pretty tired. We calculated he was already 42 per cent burnt out before the Ashes had even begun. A few weeks later, in the wake of the Headingley Test, we posted our fourth and final instalment of Joe Root Burnout Watch and then quietly retired the feature because it was starting to feel too cruel.
And then he carried on. Having already been to Australia and captained England to one 4-0 defeat, he only went and did it again, but somehow in an even worse way. And with covid lockdown restrictions to boot.
“You are burnt out from the start,” was Paul Collingwood’s assessment of that last aspect.
Root had already been smouldering for a couple of years even before that. A few months later, he stood down from the captaincy, a comprehensively broken man.
A quick dip in the hot tub time machine to bring us back to 2026 and, after Ben Stokes stayed out past his bedtime, Root was talking borderline enthusiastically about the prospect of captaining England again.
“That is one thing – in a small way, in a good way – I was slightly envious of that opportunity to work with someone like Baz in this sort of capacity,” he said in the lead-up to the second Test. “It has been really cool the last couple of days.”
And then that Test got underway and all coolness evaporated. How the memories must have come flooding back.
How many times has Root presided over a colossal lower order partnership as an all-seam attack has banged in endless costly short balls? We don’t wish to exaggerate, but we would guess at least four trillion times.
A chaotic run-out, a steady dribble of non-scores from the batters, a dearth of experience in all areas of the team – it was all there.
And also, the piece de resistance really – not exactly a familiar trauma, so much as a brand new failure borne from an older one.
Back when he had the job permanently, Root had a tendency to bowl Jofra Archer literally every chance he got before inadvertently badmouthing him for not trying hard enough. “I think there are certain spells where he can just unleash a little bit more,” he infamously once said.
Archer’s stress-fractured medical record now demands more careful management and Root has apparently signed up to this in full. With New Zealand’s tail untroubled, in the first innings of a Test match, England’s locum leader spent 90 long minutes conspicuously failing to bring Archer on to bowl – a spectacular commitment to “load management” that resulted in Jacob Bethell coming on first change with the second new ball.
You bowled him too much; you bowled him too little. You weren’t imaginative enough; you were unnecessarily funky. Who, honestly, in Joe Root’s position, would be willingly grasping the captaincy nettle right now?
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