Joe Root smashes 43rd International Ton
Highlights
- Root had scored had an unbeaten 115 to steer his team to victory
- Root has scored 27 Test tons and 16 ODI tons
Former English skipper Joe Root seems to be in the form of his life. With the clouds of bad patches looming around the likes of Steve Smith, Virat Kohli, and Kane Williamson, Root is the only cricketer in the class of fab-4 who is middling the ball better than his counterparts. In the first Test match played at Lord's, Joe Root scored a memorable 115 and saw his team home to secure a 1-0 lead over the Kiwis in this 3 match Test series.
With the Kiwis scoring a mammoth total of 553, courtesy of Mitchell's 190 off 318, it was a tough mountain for the English team to climb. Trent Boult resumed his regular business as he dismissed Crawley for 4 off 6 deliveries. Alex Lees and Ollie Pope hung in and stitched together a 141-run partnership. Pope was later joined in by Joe Root who took his own sweet time and kept the scoreboard ticking. For a time being it felt like the Kiwi bowlers had no answers to Root who scored his 43rd international ton.
Joseph Edward Root who gave up the English captaincy earlier this year looks like he is all focussed on his batting and is aging just like a fine wine. The Yorkshire batsman has always been this force that has guided the English team through all the thick and thin and has stood tall irrespective of anything happening around him. Earlier in this series, Root crossed the 10,000 runs landmark and now is just 5000 runs away from Sachin Tendulkar's record for most test runs. The kind of form Joe Root is in, it can be certainly said that few of the records that once seemed impossible to achieve are in danger of being broken.
