A batsman who has defied any notion of decline in the cricketing world over the past four years, he is England’s run machine Joe Root. The 33-year-old is already in the best shape of his life.
Root is so confident in his batting that he played an audacious reverse-slope shot against New Zealand in Wellington to complete his 36th Test century.
In fact, Root has been unstoppable since the start of 2021, scoring as many as 19 hundreds in Tests and continuing to break a slew of records.
There are no records in test cricket It is now out of reach for the British. He is already England’s highest run-getter and ranks fifth on the list of highest run-getters in Test history.
Root’s 12,886 runs are just 492 runs short of the Australian great Ricky Pontingranked second on the list, second only to the Indian legend Sachin Tendulkar. On his current form, Root will soon surpass Jacques Kallis and Rahul Dravid — other players before him — to next year.
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Only Tendulkar is ahead of Root, so how safe is the batting maestro’s record of 15,921 runs, which looked set to last when the Indian retired in 2013 over a decade ago Does it look unparalleled?
Root is currently just over 3,000 runs behind Tendulkar, but his form suggests he can and will challenge that record. Tendulkar’s record of 51 Test centuries is not far away either.
After the Sachin-Ponting era, the next top four in cricket, especially in Test matches, is India’s Root Virat KohliAustralian Steve Smith and New Zealand Kane Williamson. But the English batsman has left three other batsmen far behind in the last four years.
For example, compared to Root’s 19 Test hundreds since 2021, Williamson’s nine centuries are the second highest. During this period, Smith only added 600 runs to his tally and Kohli only added 3 runs. If we consider the entire cricket world as well, no one except the top four has scored more than eight hundred runs during this period.
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During this period, Williamson ranked second among century creators, followed by Harry Brooks at eighth. Since then, Sri Lanka’s Dimuth Karunaratne, Australia’s Usman Khawaja and Marnus Labuschagne have hit seven centuries each.
Root has amassed 5,063 runs since the start of 2021 alone, averaging 56.26 runs. No other batsman has reached the 3,000-run mark, with Karunaratna a distant second with 2,613 runs.
In the process of accumulating such a huge score, Root has become the highest scorer in the fourth innings in Test history, surpassing Tendulkar’s record of 1,625 runs. Root has now scored 1,630 runs in the fourth Test innings.
He also joined the elite list of players to score more than 50 runs in Tests, becoming the fourth batsman ever to do so. Here too, Tendulkar tops the list with 119 runs in the 50s, followed by Jacques Kallis and Ricky Ponting with 103 runs each. Root now has 100 such scores, 36 hundreds and 64 fifties. Therefore, this record will definitely not last long!
He has scored 1,470 runs this year and is on the verge of becoming just the second batsman in history to score more than 1,500 runs twice in a calendar year, a feat achieved only by Ricky Ponting in 2003 and 2005 Realized.
Root vs Kohli vs Williamson vs Smith – from 2021
- root: M 54 | R 5063 | HS 262 | AV. 56.25 | 56.25 19×100 seconds | 15×50 seconds
- Kohli: M 33 | R 1845 | HS 186 | AV. 33.54 | 33.54 3×100 seconds | 8×50 seconds
- Williamson: M 22 | R 2199 | HS 238 | 59.43 | 59.43 9×100 seconds | 5×50 seconds
- Smith: M 36 | R 2467 | HS 200* | AV. 44.85 | 44.85 6×100 seconds | 12×50 seconds
