Joe Root learning the error of his ways to put the focus back on himself and rise to the occasion

There was a revealing moment after the series defeat by the West Indies was confirmed when Root admitted ‘I can’t bat for 11 guys’ that suggested finally something has clicked

Just over a year ago, when Australia were doing their opposition planning ahead of the 2017/18 Ashes, they noticed a flaw in Joe Root’s game. Since his early years in Test cricket, Root had increasingly been moving further back in his crease with a straighter rather than angled backlift, opening up more scoring options on the off-side - but at a cost. His traditional strength - turning full, straight balls to leg - had become his principal weakness.

In the first innings at Brisbane, Pat Cummins decided to try and set him up. For three overs, he bowled outswingers on a fourth and fifth-stump line, testing Root’s patience, hoping to drag him across his stumps. Then, late in the day, he slipped in a full inswinger. Root, aligned for the outswinger, was totally deceived and trapped LBW. A decisive statement had been made.

At which point, something funny happened. In the second innings, Josh Hazlewood pulled off a version of the same trick. Then Mitchell Starc did it at Sydney, getting him caught at square leg. Then Trent Boult bowled him through the gate at Auckland. Then Mohammad Abbas at Lord’s. Then Mohammed Shami at Lord’s and Ishant Sharma at the Rose Bowl. In the space of 18 Tests, Root was out nine times to full deliveries against pace, most of them inswingers. And after Jason Holder had him LBW exactly the same way in Barbados, Root decided it was time for some remedial work.

During his century here against the West Indies, Root’s stance was noticeably more open than usual. His front pad - the source of so many of his recent troubles - seemed to stay largely inside the line of the ball. The backlift was still high and straight, the customary trigger movement still back into his crease, but wary of getting drawn towards the off-side, Root had made a minor adjustment in his alignment so his hips were facing the non-striker rather than the stumps at the opposite end.

It’s still not quite right yet. There are times when the back foot doesn’t quite go where he wants it to: sometimes it goes straight back, sometimes it splays towards leg stump, sometimes it doesn’t seem to move at all. This can occasionally get him into trouble playing wide deliveries, as when he edged a cut off Alzarri Joseph in the first innings. But his ability to negotiate full, straight balls has shown a marked improvement. He rarely looked troubled when the ball was pitched up and clipped plenty of twos and threes.

The point of all this is twofold: to underline firstly the extent to which Test batting is a game of margins, and secondly the lengths to which Root is going to try to master them. At the end of a day’s play, he will pore exhaustively over the technical data with the team analyst. He took an extra two-hour net session with batting coach Mark Ramprakash on Wednesday in an attempt to work on his game in solitude. A 16th Test century was the result, and more importantly for England, evidence that after two years spent grappling with the millstone of captaincy, Root is now beginning to turn his attentions back inwards.

Naturally, this is a partial oversimplification. No elite batsman ever really stops working on his game. But it takes a certain single-mindedness, a cocooned focus, to carry out the sort of keyhole surgery to your technique that Root has evidently been practising. In a way, the Test batsman and the Test captain are at cross-purposes: one attuned to the needs of the self, one to the whims and desires of others.

Perhaps Root’s most telling quote of the series came in the wake of the collapse in Antigua, when he argued: “I can’t bat for 11 guys.” In retrospect, it was about as close to an exasperated outburst as Root gets, the point at which he and we realised that all the informal chats and dressing room summits and best-laid plans had finally hit a dead end. Something seems to have clicked within Root during the course of this series: that there are elements of constructing a winning cricket team entirely beyond his control. If Moeen Ali really wants to play a nonsense shot on the stroke of lunch, he can’t go out there and block the ball for him. There is, however, one thing he can control, and it’s more influential than you might think.

Joe Root is learning how to strike the right balance between England captain and batting talisman (Getty)

Virtually every player averages more in wins than defeats. Usually, the disparity is significant but manageable: Jonny Bairstow averages 40 in wins and 30 in defeats, Moeen 33 and 27, Jos Buttler 40 and 32, Ben Stokes 38 and 24. Root’s, meanwhile, is utterly insane. He averages 66 in wins and 32 in defeats, a differential that ranks among the top dozen or so in Test history. So what does this tell us? That Root blows hot and cold? That he only performs when the going is good? That his team are overly reliant on him?

No, not really any of these. Look at some of the names above Root in that list: Frank Worrell, Garfield Sobers, Graeme Smith, Kumar Sangakkara, Greg Chappell, Inzamam-ul-Haq. These are some of the all-time greats of the game, but they have more in common than that. For much of their career, they were batting captains surrounded by players of comparable or even superior talent. Inzamam had Mohammed Yousuf and Younis Khan, Sangakkara had Jayawardene, Smith had Kallis, Amla and De Villiers, Worrell had the other two Ws. On a bad day, they could look downright ordinary. And yet when they located the very top tier of their game, not only were they untouchable; so were their team. When they ran hot, they won games through sheer force of exemplar.

In order to get England winning consistently, then, this is the level that Root needs to locate. He has able lieutenants like Stokes and Buttler and Bairstow who will perform now and again, but he can’t rely on them, for these are mercurial cricketers by nature. None is in Root’s class, certainly as a batsman. And so, there are times when he’ll simply have to drag his team along with him, raise the collective standard himself: play the epic, play the rearguard, play out of his skin.

Root celebrates England's third Test victory over the West Indies (AP)

As England emerge from a deeply unsatisfactory series with defeat, with the Ashes looming in less than six months and neither the time nor the will to shuffle the pack again, Root knows that he is almost out of options. But he knows, too, that victory over Australia will see this series quickly forgotten. And he knows that if he can rediscover the peak he hit in around 2015/16, and so fleetingly hinted at here, he can drag his team most of the way there. He has 16 Test centuries, and England have never lost when he’s scored one.

Root has spent the last two years getting to grips with the England captaincy (Getty)

Sometimes, you can lose sight of the bigger picture in the smaller details. Ultimately, England’s success as a Test team won’t depend on Joe Denly or Keaton Jennings or Ramprakash. It won’t depend on whether Buttler bats at No 5 or No 7. It won’t depend on whether or not they play football in the mornings, or the number of warm-up games they play, or whether the County Championship is fourteen games or twelve. It will depend on whether their biggest players can rise to the occasion, and in particular the man at the crux, the one who defines it more than any other. And there were signs, even in a cursory consolation win, that England’s talisman may just be turning a corner.