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Joe Root has been on an extraordinary run of form over the past five years (AP Photo)
Joe Root ended his rather perplexing century drought in Australia on a day when the rest of his teammates largely struggled to deal with Mitchell Starc and the pink ball in the second Ashes Test at the Gabba. Root finished the day batting on 135 off 202, powering England to a score of 325/9 with Starc taking six wickets. It was Root’s first ever Test century in Australia but it also made him just the fourth player of all time to score 40 centuries in his career in this format.
Root joined former Australia captain Ricky Ponting (41 centuries), South Africa great Jacques Kallis (45) and India legend Sachin Tendulkar (51) in being the only players to have scored 40 tons in the history of Test cricket. The 34-year-old has been on an extraordinary run of form over the past five years, finishing three of the four calendar years between 2021 and 2024 with over thousand runs in Test cricket and is widely touted to break Tendulkar’s long standing record for most runs in the format. Root’s career tally stands at 13,686 after Day 1 of the pink-ball Test while Tendulkar finished with 15,921 runs in 200 matches.
Root silences critics
Root had been under pressure before this Test, having been dismissed for a duck and eight runs in the series opener in Perth, which England lost by eight wickets in just two days. Before that, he had been derided by the Australian media for his rather ordinary record in the country.
On Thursday, Root stood steady at one end while his teammates tried to stick to the Bazball template at the other despite the unique challenge of facing Starc with the pink ball. He looked a little jittery as he inched closer towards the three-figure mark, hanging the bat out and almost nicking off on a couple of occassions. However, he finally got there by clipping one off his legs off Scott Boland to the boundary for a four. He took off his helmet and raised his bat before giving a little shrug, almost as if he was saying that this was long overdue.
Root then turned on the style once England got down to their last wicket as he and Jofra Archer switched to some T20 style batting. Their 10th-wicket partnership extraordinarily read 61 runs off 44 balls at the end of the day pushed England past the 325-run mark, thus giving the visitors a slight edge despite Starc’s effort.
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