England v India: Joe Root is back and better than ever
As Michael Atherton remarked in The Times, it was sad that Ted Dexter didn’t live long enough to watch Joe Root’s innings at Headingley on Thursday. Dexter was a great admirer of Root and had given him good advice a couple of years ago when the England captain was out of form – out of luck too – and was tinkering with his game. Dexter, who always insisted that batting is “a sideways game”, would surely have delighted in the way Root played. I am not sure I have ever seen him bat better, rarely with such freedom. His hundred came up in around three hours, very fast for these days when over rates are so slow.
Ted Dexter was a great batsman himself. He was the youngest of a clutch of great English batsmen who came of age in the 1950s: Tom Graveney, Peter May, Colin Cowdrey, Ken Barrington. One might add David Sheppard, the future Bishop of Liverpool, who retired from full-time cricket when at theological college but was twice recalled and scored centuries against Australia at Old Trafford in 1956 and Melbourne in January 1963. Dexter was England’s captain on that Australian tour and shared a century partnership with the Reverend on the way to victory.
Like May, Cowdrey and Sheppard, Dexter belonged to the last age of amateurism, the amateur-professional distinction being removed in 1962. He was Cambridge captain in my first year at the university, and I was lucky enough to watch him often at Fenner’s. The news that Dexter was due to bat had undergraduates skipping lectures or abandoning libraries.
He probably wasn’t the last university batsman of whom this might be said – that was probably Majid Kahn of Pakistan and Glamorgan – but certainly some of my happiest hours in May 1958 were spent watching Dexter at Fenner’s. I have a clear picture in my mind of him driving a Lancashire fast bowler over his head, first-bounce to the boundary.
Dexter made nine Test hundreds, several huge ones. That’s not a lot by today’s standards. One must remember, however, that many more Tests are played now than in his time. He played 62 Tests, with 101 innings. Joe Root has now played more Tests than Dexter had innings.
Curiously Dexter is most vividly remembered not for any of his big scores, but for shorter innings in which he shone with a gem-like brilliance. The most famous was against the West Indies at Lord’s in 1963 when he made 70 in 80 minutes, repeatedly driving the fearsome fast bowlers Wes Hall and Charlie Griffith, off the front foot to the boundary.
Three years earlier, when England was set 256 in just under four hours to beat Australia at Old Trafford, Dexter hit a glorious 76 in eighty-something minutes and seemed to have set England well on the way to victory until Richie Benaud switched to bowling his leg-spin round the wicket into the rough, had Dexter caught behind and ran through the rest of the England batting to win the game.
A couple of days later, I was playing cricket myself, and there was an argument about who should be held responsible for the debacle. Most blamed Brian Close, out caught for 8, having as a left-hander decided to combat Benaud with the sweep, and persisting with the shot after being dropped once and despite having once successfully hit Benaud straight for six.
I blamed Peter May, bowled round his legs for a duck as he tried to sweep. But our captain, my old cricket master, had no doubts: “I blame Dexter,” he said, “he was well-in and shouldn’t have got out.” A harsh judgement, but I suppose he had a point.
Comparing the areas where Dexter scored his runs and where Root generally scores his, tells you as much about the changes in the game as it does about the two batsmen. Dexter’s chart would show boundaries hit in the V – that is the arc between a wide mid-off and a wide mid-on. Most would have been struck off the front foot. On Thursday, Root mainly scored off the back foot, square or to the third man on the off-side, behind or just in front of square on the onside. There were only a couple of boundaries in the V.
This reflects, not only his ability to score off the back-foot but the difference in bowling between then and now. In Dexter’s day, pace bowlers tended to bowl a fuller length and to aim to hit the stumps more often. The great Brian Statham put it simply: “if he misses, I hit.” His equally great Lancashire successor, James Anderson, doesn’t hit the stumps that often, though time and again, he causes batsmen to miss.
It’s pretty common now to see overs from a pace bowler in which not a single ball could hit the wicket and it is also usual to hear a commentator say “too straight” when the bowler has been played through mid-wicket, even though the batsman would have been out if he had missed the “too straight” delivery. In contrast, Ted Dexter was out ”bowled” more often than top batsmen tend to be today, partly because the ball was bowled on a driving length, often went to the boundary, but sometimes hit the stumps.
Meanwhile, Joe Root’s innings on Thursday were sheer delight. One might call it his happiest century since he was a cub. Of course, it helped to come in with the score of 159/2 rather than the 10 or 20 for two with which he has been more familiar.
A couple of years ago, in the last Ashes series, his reputation was sinking. He was struggling while Australia’s Steve Smith was flourishing. There were theories – one advanced by Ted Dexter on his blog – as to how you might get Smith out. Australians might still value Root’s wicket higher than any other, but they weren’t putting that sort of question. Root, it seemed, was falling – had indeed fallen – behind the other members of the Big Four – Smith, Virat Kohli and Kane Williamson, just as Andy Murray had fallen behind Federer, Nadal and Djokovic.
Well, there’s no question about it: Root is back, and indeed it’s Kohli who is provoking the mutterers, (though, writing this before he comes to the wicket in India’s second innings, I’m well aware that the mutterers may have been quietened by the time this is read).
No matter. Let Shakespeare speak for Root: “Now is the winter of our discontent/ Made glorious summer by this son of York”, or to be more narrowly precise, “Sheffield”.