Bazball has lit a fire under Joe Root. Will he overtake Tendulkar in about 27 Tests?

This is great, but how does he compare to his greatest contemporaries? For that we have to dip into the Fab Four files, and remark that while Kane Williamson averages a bit more than Root, and Steve Smith plenty more, none of those others has had to sustain that excellence across as many Test matches, nor have any of them breached 11,000 Test runs. Virat Kohli has retired, of course, and Williamson doesn’t play for a team with a steady Test schedule. But then Root is the youngest of the four.None of the others has 6000 runs either home or away. Root has passed 6000 on both fronts. That Root plays more Tests per year than the others in the Fab Four explains some of this. But those runs still have to be made.

With 7329 runs at home Root is the second-most prolific home batter in history, after Ponting. He needs exactly 250 runs to top that chart.Root is also one of the most evolved batters of his generation, partly because he plays for England – a team that seems to go through more phases than others, which in turn is perhaps a function of how much cricket they play. There have been several low ebbs and new eras in Root’s career, but vitally, in the last few years, England have been blessed with the arrival of saviour coach Brendon McCullum, who came down from the mountain in June 2022 to hand down the sacred diktat of Bazball.It will surprise almost no one by now that Root has the highest Test-match strike rate of the Fab Four. But it is useful to break down his career into the Before Baz (BB) and After Baz (AB) eras – since the year of our Baz, if you’re traditional.Root is on record talking about how much he struggled to adjust to the new, hyper-aggressive batting philosophy. But his numbers have definitely had a Bazball glow-up. The career stats of the other Fab Four have been included in the graph below for comparison. Where Root was a middling Fab Four member Before Baz, his After Baz numbers taken alone put him above the others. He was prolific just before McCullum’s arrival too, enjoying his richest year in 2021. But at that stage he hadn’t ratcheted up the scoring rate, and the stats bear this out.

He has new shots to go with it, such as that reverse scoop. Kohli and Smith have also added new gears to their game over the course of the last 15 years, but Root has had to tackle entirely new modes of batting. Williamson is probably the least changed of the four, having quietly continued on his personal batting journey, even during New Zealand’s own proto-Bazball era, when McCullum was captain.What is striking about Root’s Bazball numbers, however, is that while he has become a mass producer of runs in the last few years, his runs have actually been less vital to the team’s totals than they used to be. One of the critiques of Bazball has been that it would not have worked anywhere near so well if England didn’t have an all-time great run machine such as Root in the top five. But the numbers paint a picture of symbiosis between Root’s batting and Bazball. Where between 2015 and the start of the Baz era, Root contributed 17.32% of England’s runs, in the Baz era, he has only contributed 16.10%.So while in numerical terms Root’s batting has expanded, that expansion appears to have been eased by his being surrounded by batters such as Harry Brook and Ben Duckett, whose belligerence he has learned to jive with. It’s not that Root bats in their slipstream so much as that he tends to take cues from more aggressive batters and join in on the fun, which is an unusual move for batters whose greatness has already been established.Fascinatingly, what has driven this Baz-era improvement are his numbers against seam bowling. Where once he used to be just a little above average against fast bowling and it was his numbers against spin that carried him into the realms of greatness, that situation now seems to have been reversed. Getting back into the ODI team at roughly the time Bazball was starting up (he hadn’t played the format for about a year) may also have simplified Root’s training – his cricket across formats became more singularly focused on attack. Much of that fresh aggression appears to be directed at fast bowling.

While he has added new boundary options, he has also worked on scoring off balls he otherwise might have defended. In his first 50 balls at the crease Root used to play out dots to almost 75% of his deliveries. But After Baz, that figure is down to just under 66% – a roughly 9% difference. His overall dot-ball percentage has dropped almost as much.

Perhaps what is most impressive about Root’s career, however, is how few holes it has. Of the ten countries he has played in, he averages less than 45 only in two. Perhaps his Bangladesh average of 24.50 can be excused by his only having played two Tests there, but for his critics, that Australia average of 35.68 is a bit of a sticking point.England players’ legacies have traditionally been defined by Ashes contributions. But 21st century examinations of greatness need not be hung up on colonial rivalries. Since Root debuted, South Africa has been a significantly more difficult place to score runs than Australia – the batting average there down at 27.53, in comparison to Australia’s 31.74.In South Africa, which has produced the two fast bowlers with the best strike rates this century (Dale Steyn and Kagiso Rabada), Root averages an outstanding 50.21. He also averages 51.50 in the West Indies, which since the introduction of the Dukes ball there has been more difficult for batting. During Root’s career, there has statistically not been a more difficult place to score runs (Ireland is being excluded here, having hosted just two Tests). The other two toughest countries to bat in have been India and England.

The idea that Root is England’s greatest Test batter in history is gaining traction now. Len Hutton never faced down a phalanx of spinners in Chattogram, Jack Hobbs never had to know the terror of a fast bowler carried in with the southerly at the Basin Reserve, Geoffrey Boycott never knew the vexations of a Sri Lankan carrom ball. Additionally, none of Graham Thorpe, Alastair Cook, Graham Gooch, Alec Stewart, or Kevin Pietersen had an average in the 50s.What elevates Root into the highest realms of batting greatness, however, is the sheer, dizzying scale and breadth of challenges he has overcome. Only the Big Three teams undertake serious Test schedules now, and of those teams, England play the most Tests against non-Big Three teams by a distance. With India and Australia tending to relegate non-Big Three teams to two-Test series, sides such as New Zealand, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and South Africa only play three-Test series against England any more. Root’s consistent excellence in many of the smaller countries has helped give his body of work a battle-tested completeness that other top batters of the era don’t quite have. Root, for instance, has run tallies of 500 or more in more countries than the others in the Fab Four.

The lack of that big hundred in Australia will bug him of course, and perhaps the next Ashes will be an opportunity to right that perceived shortcoming. He now not only scores more runs off the balls he is at the crease for, he bats in a more reliable top order than ever before, which in turn is less reliant on him. These are all generally great ingredients for hundred-making, and his hugely improved rate of converting fifties to hundreds over the last few years reflects this. Where until the end of the last Ashes, only 30.2% of Root’s scores of 50-plus were hundreds, since then, 55% of his scores of 50-plus have been centuriesFew batters have aced such a wide spread of tests as Root. He already deserves his place among the greatest. If he finishes atop the run charts, the adaptability and vision he has shown to embrace new modes of operation after he was already established as England’s pre-eminent batter, will have been the wind that carries him there.With inputs from Namooh Shah, Shiva Jayaraman, S Rajesh and Vithushan Ehantharajah