It has to rank – and “rank” is the key word – as the worst, stupidest shot in the history of English Test cricket.
Joe Root will notice it as much as anyone else after his self-dismissal, which was 100 percent a batsman’s error. Every run India scores in their second innings will be agony as he knows he could have still been batting had he not given in to the impulse.
Root’s reverse scoop off India’s most dangerous bowler, Jasprit Burmah, ruined England’s chances of winning this Test and this series. Never mind Bazball’s team strategy: what mattered was the situation of the game, the current circumstances, the here and now. And what Root did was against what dictated everything, as he himself realized in his moment of wisdom after the event, when he punched away in anger at himself.
Ravi Ashwin, the 500 Test wicket winner, could not take the field after flying home due to family reasons. So India was left with just four bowlers. One of them, Bumrah, was even more dangerous than usual because it was the first hour of day three, the only time of day when the pitch is a little damp and the ball moves a little. The old adage of giving the first hour to the bowler, although often outdated, was applicable on this occasion.
India were bereft of ideas at the end of day two. Rohit Sharma was at his wits’ end when it came to containing Ben Duckett. All Root had to do was hang around for the first hour, for his partner’s sake, play fair and normal, and wait for Duckett’s juices to flow again. That’s what Root had done, caressing the ball, like when he stroked a wide ball from Bumrah behind his point, without trying to hit the ball too hard or act strangely.
The cardinal sin in India is giving away a wicket, because one wicket usually gets two, or a cluster. Root made life difficult for Duckett. He made it impossible for Jonny Bairstow, who came in with fielders around the bat. The crowd got moving and immediately succumbed to India’s wrist spinner Kuldeep Yadav. From there the wickets continued to tumble.
Root doesn’t have to reinvent itself. He has scored more than a thousand runs in India, like no other English batsman except Sir Alastair Cook. He can hit perfectly. He has previously batted perfectly in Asia, when he scored Test double hundreds in Sri Lanka and India. Nothing was broken; he had nothing to fix but the devil on his shoulder, the little joker who wanted him to dare to see if he could back up and get away with it.
Yes, Root has played it before, and early in an innings, but there was more logic behind the shot when a left-arm bowler bowled across the wicket, like Neil Wagner in New Zealand or Mitchell Starc in the Ashes. The ball then flew over him. If he missed, he was unlikely to be bowled. The percentages were more in his favor.
But the chances of getting away with it against Bumrah, who attacks the stumps and never bothers to hang the ball outside the stump? At a distance. And especially for a batsman who is not as good as Root, having been dismissed twice by Bumrah in his previous Test and eight times in their previous 12 Tests.
Didn’t Root watch as Ollie Pope tried to do exactly what Root was trying to do? And Pope saw it like a football, at the time at 196 in the Hyderabad Test. If Pope, who was on fire, couldn’t scoop Bumrah in reverse and ended up with the stumps spread, didn’t that help the English data analysis for this series?
Root’s attempt to reinvent himself and play funky shots comes from pure motives: he wants to do what’s best for the team, and “buying into” the overall strategy seems the most selfless to him. But Bazball, if that’s the right way to define Ben Stokes and Brendon McCullum’s approach (which is debatable), was never about reckless, uncalculated risk-taking.
Duckett has opened up a new style of Test match batting, yes, but, crucially, having practiced his sweeps and reverse sweeps throughout his professional career. His breathtaking blows are not risky because they are ingrained in him, his controlled reflexes. Root has to deviate from his traditional game, which has served him for a decade, in order to play his ramps and scoops, which will therefore work sometimes, but not as often as when Duckett plays them. A big difference in level when it matters most, with a Test series on the line.
Another example of Root’s state of mind is his slip fielding. It stands much wider as the only slip for the spinners than the convention dictates. Why? Presumably because he wants to cover a larger area for the sake of his team. But that’s not how cricket works. Convention is convention because it worked.
And so we have seen Root miss two slip catches in this series that would have gone straight to him had he been in the orthodox position, but which required him to lunge to the left and miss. One was crucial, in India’s first innings of this third Test, when Rohit Sharma defeated Tom Hartley. India would have ended up four behind had Root not tried to rewrite the script.
In the annals, the worst or stupidest shot has always been regarded as Brian Close’s sweep shot in the 1961 Old Trafford Test, when the Ashes were up for reconquest. Richie Benaud was bowling the wicket in the rough environment. England were 150 to one, chasing 256, and collapsed.
Close was castigated as a left-hander for trying to clear Benaud’s leg breaks that landed in the rough outside his stump. West Indian captain Frank Worrell (soon to be Sir Frank) was a neutral spectator, writing in his column for The Observer: ‘His tactics were completely incomprehensible, the technique that of a captain practicing his leg slips on the eve of a Test match. A more unorthodox exhibition will certainly never be seen in Test cricket again. This was the turning point of the match.”
Of course, Close was never lost for words. While looking at Bazball from above, he said that he should not have swept Benaud, but he should have swept him backwards.
Ollie Pope also has a mention in the Worst Shots ever played by an England Test batsman, when England were top of Australia at Lord’s last summer and Nathan Lyon had just limped off. But Pope learned from his mistake. He was given a second chance and he made the most of it. Root is old enough to have known better.