Ahead of a particularly insipid tour of the West Indies in 2019, Joe Root in an interview with Sky Sports said one of the most stupid things an England Test captain has ever said:
“You don’t win Tests by batting for eight hours”.
A little over 12 months removed from watching first-hand as Steve Smith repeatedly batted for 8 hours and won a lot, and just 6 months shy from again watching Steve Smith repeatedly bat for 8 hours and winning slightly less often, Joe Root opined on-air that his team did not need long amounts of time in the middle to be successful.
In the first Test of the series proceeding that interview, the West Indies batted for nearly 8 hours in their first innings and for more than 8 hours in their second. England lost the final 9 of their 10 first innings wickets within a single session on Day 2. I don’t need to tell you which side won by 381 runs.
Perhaps it’s a bit unfair on Joe to not complete that quote. What he said in full was:
“You don’t win Tests by batting for eight hours; you win Tests by scoring runs for eight hours”
Root had spent his entire captaincy to this point under the coaching of Trevor Bayliss, a man who would sooner play with 10 than tell a top order batsman to slow down.
Bayliss’ cricketing ethos was to beat the opposition with bravado and aggression, by committing to constant attack. If you’re 30/3, you drive your way forward. If you’re stuck in a hole, you dig up, stupid. He yearned for players who could take the game away from the opposition as quickly as possible; in fact Sam Billings was England’s only ODI opener in the Bayliss era who didn’t get a run in the top 3 in the Test team.
This approach was certainly not without its success. Bayliss’ England were undefeated in home series. They beat South Africa in South Africa and swept Sri Lanka in Sri Lanka. There’s even an argument to be made that their unerringly positive approach to Test match cricket might have aided their success with the white ball.
They also capitulated very, very frequently when the going got tough. When a competitive total was 550, when the first innings deficit was 150, when the only viable positive result was to bat two days for a draw, this England Test team collapsed in on itself, safe in the comfort that their “natural game” was always encouraged.
If England were supposed to have players that could take the game away from the opposition in a session, they more frequently took it away from themselves.
England got thrashed in big away series on surfaces where taking wickets was difficult. They came to be personified by Jonny Bairstow getting caught at mid on trying to bat out a draw, by Jason Roy dancing past Nathan Lyon at Edgbaston, by being the team that repeatedly made 400 and lost by an innings. They developed an embarrassing habit for losing all their wickets in a couple of hours. Their number 5 batsman was more likely to come to the wicket with 30 on the board than 300.
Team selection became a constant battle between picking from a very shallow pool of top order options and packing as much talent into the side whichever way it came. Perpetual debates existed around Root batting at his preferred 4 or accommodating an extra middle order bat by moving up at 3. Bairstow at 5 or Bairstow keeping wicket or maybe Bairstow doing both, or neither. Moeen as a spinner, as a batsman, as an opener, as a number 5, as Liam Dawson’s backup???
It was easy to understand why you might reshuffle the order to accommodate as many of England’s exciting middle order players as possible, or why you might insist on moving Bairstow up in the order while allowing him to keep wicket per his insistence, but eventually England’s lineups became a confused, jumbled mess, frequently featuring 6 bowlers, shoe-horned number 3 batsmen, specialist number 7s and players with First Class averages in the 30s batting at 10. Match previews frequently featured the words “even though he’s never batted higher than 5 for his county”.
Opener Rory Burns debuted in the winter of 2018 and within his first 12 months in the job he’d had more opening partners than Andrew Strauss had in his entire career.
Perhaps the final Test before the 2019 Ashes — a one off against Ireland at Lord’s — best encapsulated the Trevor Bayliss era. A hopelessly misshapen England XI, still fatigued and hungover from the World Cup finishing just days prior, laboured to a huge first innings deficit against the massive underdogs.
Facing Tim Murtagh on a tricky, green Lord’s surface was a significant challenge, and England decided to approach it by charging it head-on. Batsmen 5 through 7 all made ducks; Jonny Bairstow lost his off stump attempting to get off the mark with one of the most insulting flat-footed hacks the sport has witnessed. Flashy third innings from Jason Roy and Sam Curran, as well as a miracle 92 from nightwatchman Jack Leach eked England to 181 runs ahead. With the game on the line, Stuart Broad and Chris Woakes displayed their brilliance to bowl Ireland out for 38 without making a bowling change. England did everything wrong from fixture scheduling, to lineup balance, to their approach to batsmanship, and they won by more than 100 runs.
When Tim Sherwood was Tottenham manager, Tottenham used to play without tactics and instead kind of take it in turns with the opposition to have attacks. Spurs had enough quality in their squad to win more games than they lost, but when presented with a better team like Liverpool or Manchester City, Kyle Naughton and co. had little choice but to surrender 6–0.
It would be unfair on Bayliss to liken him to Tactics Tim, but perhaps a better footballing analogy would be Zinedine Zidane simultaneously managing a 2016–18 Real Madrid side with Cristiano Ronaldo (Eoin Morgan’s ODI team) and a 2021 Real Madrid without Ronaldo (Joe Root’s Test team).
A laissez-faire approach to management that allows all available talent freedom to fire is commendable if it keeps an uber-talented squad excelling in harmony (and Bayliss really deserves to be commended for the success of England’s limited overs sides), but if all you ever bring to the table is ‘be your brilliant selves’ you will never beat anyone better than you.
In Bayliss’ 4 and a half years as England head coach, his team batted for 160+ overs in an innings just once. In the 15 months Chris Silverwood has been in the role the opposition have already been offered a third new ball three different times.
Joe Root’s England in 2021 bat for eight hours, and then they keep batting. Sometimes they’re scoring freely, sometimes they’re just hanging in there and waiting for scoring to get easier.
When given first use of a pristine Chennai surface in 2021 — a Test which has just concluded at time of writing — and reaching stumps on Day 1 at 263/3, the England captain sang a slightly different tune to his self of two years’ prior.
“We’ve got to look to try and get as many as we can – 600, 700 if we can, really try and make the most of the first innings while it’s good”
The idea behind the words remains the same, but the difference in their intent is enormous. Of course scoring for eight hours is better than surviving for eight hours, but surviving for eight hours has proven to be more effective than scoring for four hours and then falling over in a heap.
The four most recently completed series under Chris Silverwood represent four straight series of the bowling attack collectively averaging between 23 and 28, and of the top 7 batsmen averaging at least 39 (and that figure has risen in each of those series). Four straight series wins, a staggering six consecutive away victories culminating in an outstanding opening triumph in Chennai.
England aren’t winning series with reliance on individual moments of brilliance, they’re doing so by consistently being better than their opposition at every facet of the game. You can argue that marching to 500 and steadily winning from there is less fun than a Sam Curran 45 being the difference between winning and losing, but it’s hard to argue that it’s less good.
One of the first things to change was the aforementioned talent-first selection policy. Round pegs now go in to round holes, even if that means selecting a number three batsman with an okay First Class record and leaving one of their umpteen lower-middle-order batsmen out of the side. The wicketkeeper bats at 7, there’s one all-rounder, and four bowlers are selected on their bowling ability.
There’s still loads of middle order flair, but that flair now arrives at the wicket after Dom Sibley has bored a pace attack out of their minds for three sessions and not when Jason Roy has flashed at a wide one with 18 runs on the board.
The approach to bowling on unhelpful surfaces seems to have slowly improved as well. The England of old were prone to letting decent first innings totals slide into large 2nd innings deficits through long, listless displays in the field. The soundbites would be about bowling blueprints to bore Steve Smith into a mistake but the reality would be testing his concentration with one on his pads every 4th delivery.
Silverwood’s England display use of bowling plans tailored to different batsmen, schemes to bring reverse swing into play, creative fielding placements, selection and rotation of faster bowlers who can provide that something extra, and while sometimes nothing you do will stop the very best teams racking up runs against you, the results so far have been stellar.
England win Tests overseas under Silverwood the same way they used to win them under Andy Flower: bat long, bowl dry, set plans for batsmen, remain resilient, declare with a 400 run lead. Silverwood has won 6 of his opening 9 Tests overseas, Bayliss won 7 of his total 27. Silverwood’s total number of wins in India and Australia is greater after one Test than what Bayliss achieved in his ten attempts.
There’s been a clear tactical return to basic, unfashionable fundamentals. A top order that chews up balls and takes shine off the new ball makes life easier for the middle order. If a flat pitch is going to break up later, then the longer you can bat on it, the more challenging it will be when you hand it over to your opponents. Setting big first innings totals allows you to control the game with runs on the board. Fielders that have spent 190 overs in the field are more prone to lapses at the crease when they finally reach it.
These truths seems so sensible, simple and obvious, but it’s jarringly often that pundits and commentators seem to disagree.
Dom Sibley was slated from the commentary box for spending 556 minutes blocking and mistiming his way from 81/3 to 341/4 after England were inserted under grey Manchester skies by West Indies in 2020. Michael Holding went as far as to decree Sibley’s 120 “a fantastic innings with my West Indies hat on”, believing the innings was so slow it was of more use to the visitors’ efforts of drawing the game than to England’s of winning it.
Sibley and Stokes’ glacial 156 ball 50 partnership was met with commentators opining “they would have wanted it to come at a quicker pace”, that “pressure was building on the batsmen” (not on the bowling team that won the toss and had 3 wickets to show for their first day’s efforts), and that England were “going nowhere”.
Ultimately, Holding and company were wrong. England went on to post 469 runs in a long, slow 160 overs and managed to convert this position into a big, comfortable victory. It warrants repeating that scoring loads of runs is good and that 5 days is a lot of time.
Maybe if Sibley had holed out on 20 he would have been praised for showing some positive intent?
If Joe Root’s approach to captaincy has changed under Silverwood, the effect the new coach seems to have had on his batting is even more pronounced.
A stunning breakout summer in 2014 cemented Root’s position among the elite batsmen in the world, but as the other members of The Fab Four set higher and higher the standard required to keep pace, Root started to lag behind.
From 2016 to about 2018 he was still a masterful player, with his glorious punches off the top of his back foot, and his unrivalled ability to sweep and paddle spin bowling. His famous tendency to fall between 50 and 100 was somewhat offset by the sheer volume of his 50s. Even at a level below his contemporaries — players that no-one deserves to have their achievements measured against — Root was steadily building a career to rival any modern England great.
From the beginning of the 2018 summer to the finish of the 2019 Ashes, Root averaged 33.33 across 19 Tests. His career Test average that had cleared 56 in 2016 dipped below 50 in January 2019 and was under 48 by September. His 50 to 100 conversion rate issue resolved itself gradually simply because he wasn’t even reaching 50 any more. The issue was no longer that Root wasn’t meeting the lofty standards of Steve Smith and Virat Kohli, he now didn’t even look like the best batsman in his team.
Root hit a double hundred in the second Test he played under Chris Silverwood. There are innumerable factors beyond a coaching change that explain an uptick in form at this point in time, not least the enormous toll the 2019 World Cup appeared to have had on all of England’s multi-format players bar Ben Stokes, but a slightly altered approach does seem to have helped him.
The Joe Root of the last year-and-a-bit looks less frenetic at the crease. There’s not a single commentator on Sky’s payroll who hasn’t remarked on how “busy” Root is while batting, but while the quality of his strokeplay married with his exuberant, positive approach are critical to who he is as a batsman, they’ve also played some part in his downfall.
Root 2.0 appears more settled once he’s played himself in, and nowhere was this more evident than in Sri Lanka in 2021. So unwaveringly in control was the England captain, so perfectly timed and selected were each and every one of his dozens of sweeps and dabs, that these innings represented not merely a glimpse of his old self but perhaps a new peak of his powers. There was a point in time where England fans looked to the batsmen who were once considered his peers now producing big scores with robotic consistency and asked why he couldn’t do that. Scores of 180 in three consecutive Test matches felt like him doing that.
He didn’t chase bad balls between 60 and 80; there were no positive-but-loose drives outside his off stump or inside edges attempting to run the ball down to third man as he does countless times in One Day games. Maybe he felt less of a need to keep his scoring rate up.
And as much as this looks like a trained technique adjustment, maybe this is just drawing causation between points where none really exists. Maybe it’s completely premature to suggest Root has turned a new leaf at all. After all, batting in the subcontinent is different to batting elsewhere. 14 months of form could merely represent a purple patch, and even then the returns of his shortened 2020 summer were modest. But the change seen so far is startling.
Root’s average and conversion rate fell in aggregate under Bayliss, and have shot up since. Averaging 45 is not an insignificant feat, but the disconnect between being good enough to reach 50 in more Tests than you don’t while having a conversion rate of just 23% speaks of a player not realising their full potential.
Three of five career double tons have occurred between Tests 87–100, and those three account for his last four hundreds, the other being a score of 181. The kid who couldn’t stop throwing his wicket away before he got to 80 has converted half of his last eight 50s into massive hundreds.
This change hasn’t even come directly at a cost to his speed of scoring: his 57.55 Strike Rate under Silverwood is actually marginally higher than the 57.27 it was under Bayliss. The main difference seems to be that Root is more comfortable waiting for scoring opportunities to arrive, and a higher strike rate is simply the result of spending a greater proportion of his balls faced batting in innings while well and truly set. If you slow down until you reach 100, but you reach 100 more often, you don’t really slow down at all.
When Trevor Bayliss hangs up the dog-thrower once his T20 circuit days are done, he’ll look back on his England career and remember proudly how he guided an excitingly talented One Day team into becoming dynamic and dominant world champions. Under his watch, England players were encouraged to express themselves in ways their predecessors had never been allowed, and the brand of cricket they played was as thrilling as it was successful.
Perhaps that white ball focus came at the neglect of the Test team’s full potential. In Chris Silverwood’s early days that potential, along with the potential that Joe Root showed early in his career, is starting to be properly realised. England are starting to look like a world class Test team for the first time since Cook, Swann and Pietersen were winning in India nine years ago.
