Perth: Joe Root has given every impression of being in control of his emotions on this tour, but his shot against Nathan Lyon was the desperate stroke of a captain losing an Ashes series.
Root must feel as if he is running into the Fremantle Doctor blowing a gale. He has been buffeted by off-field incidents that he could never have imagined when he left home on October 28, his runs have dried up and his team are losing a Test in which they scored 403 in the first innings. Remarkably, off the field, Root has stayed level.
He was his usual polite self before this Test, speaking honestly about the challenge of captaincy and articulately defending his team over their so-called drinking culture. He knows there is no such thing, just a few players who do silly things that have happened on cricket tours for decades and would go unnoticed if Ben Stokes had not been arrested three months ago.
At the toss, he smirked when he said England would bat, harking back to his decision to bowl in Adelaide. He then poked fun at commentator Mark Nicholas when he asked the England captain about “Alastair Root”. “After 150 Tests, you’d think you would get his name right by now.” It was not exactly the performance of a captain racked by tension and befuddled by a scrambled mind.
But that was before his team became the latest England side to be crushed at the WACA. Two more low scores for Root, and both to poor dismissals, too, have left him averaging 29 and sinking to the level of Cook four years ago.
Cook finished that whitewash with an average of 24, one of the lowest of modern times by an England batsman-captain in Australia. There has not really been a pattern of dismissals for Root. They have been spread out. He has fallen to full, short, wide and straight balls. The pitch map of his dismissals looks like a dot-to-dot puzzle.
The big drive at Lyon’s first ball was the worst of the lot. Caught down the leg side in the first innings was soft.
He played beautifully in the second innings in Adelaide, briefly sparking thoughts of one of the great captain’s innings in Australia, until Josh Hazlewood found his range on the final morning and Root was caught behind off the under-edge of the bat.
Root started this series ranked second in the world. He will end it below Steve Smith, Virat Kohli and Kane Williamson, the three fellow stars of batting with whom he is constantly compared. Centuries by England captains in Australia are rare. There have been only 10 in Ashes Tests, four of those were before 1902, and Archie MacLaren is the only captain to have scored two hundreds in Australia. Andrew Strauss’s 110 in Brisbane seven years ago stands alone as the sole hundred this century by an England captain, so the task of handling leadership and run-making that faced Root was certainly massive. Despite the lack of hundreds, most England captains have managed not to cave in under the pressure. Mike Atherton, Graham Gooch, Nasser Hussain and Alec Stewart were able to hold their own in losing series. Cook was crushed by the unrelenting media attention, the behind-the-scenes ructions, as well as Ryan Harris’s length and pace.
Root has not been traduced as a batsman in the same way as Cook four years ago. Cook looked defeated as an opener then in the same way that he does now.
In Perth, Root managed to get himself out twice and Australian talk of finding an lbw weakness after Brisbane was just Ashes propaganda. But a captain’s shoulders can only take so much weight. At the WACA, he watched as his team threw away a commanding lead in the first innings and then stood in the field for two days, neutered by a lack of pace and ground down by his opposing number, as Australia recorded their highest home Ashes score.
In the first Test in Brisbane, Root’s captaincy was jaunty and imaginative. He showed a real attacking flair that England lacked under Cook. In Adelaide, he took the fight to Smith. In Perth, the stress of it all seemed to catch up with him.
