When Joe Root drops catches, Joe Root blames the ball.

Remember when English commentators were talking up Josh Tongue’s “extra pace” because he was bowling 85mph? That seems even more nonsensical now after Mark Wood made the Headingley crowd gasp at not just the obvious threat of his bowling but even the speed gun read-outs as he walked back to his mark.

Wood’s first spell was, in at least one respect, perfect. It was certainly dramatic when Stuart Broad dismissed David Warner in his first over, but Wood improved on that by first getting everyone on the edges of their seats and only then knocking Usman Khawaja’s stumps out of the ground with a 95mph snorter.

That’s how you do fast bowling. Get everyone watching, ratchet up the tension, and then deliver the most satisfying and unequivocal dismissal of all. Watching live, we made an involuntary noise of a pitch and timbre we have never achieved before.

Wood pretty much stuck to that method for the rest of the innings. Three of his wickets were bowled and one was LBW, while Alex Carey was essentially caught hit-on-the-head-a-minute-ago, playing a shot he almost certainly wouldn’t have attempted otherwise.

In short, Wood reminded England that the stumps existed after all of the bowlers and one of the batters had forgotten in the previous Test.

Targeting the stumps was a particularly wise approach given the most obvious alternative was relying on team-mates to catch the ball, which is just a mad, mad thing that England bowlers probably should not do.

Several players were at fault. Joe Root put down a couple of chances and then when he finally caught one, he flung the ball into the ground with all his might, as if the ball were the one at fault here.

This reminded us of two things.

1. Ben Stokes trying to throw the ball to New South Wales directly through the centre of the planet in the 2019 Ashes
2. Root’s “Ahhhhhh! In your FACE, ball!” celebration after finally catching one against New Zealand last year

It is not the ball’s fault, Joe.

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Do you know England’s first-choice XI for the upcoming 50-over World Cup? Do England?

There’s a lot of job sharing in the various England teams these days. Players flit in and flit out to the extent that it’s actually pretty hard to identify the first choice XI. That’s mostly okay because generally you don’t ever get to play your first choice XI anyway. But then it’s a World Cup and finally you do.

So who’s in England’s? Or – more interestingly – who isn’t?

Rejuvenation, experimentation, ambivalence

They may be 50-over world champions, but England haven’t exactly been an all-conquering force of late. With no more one-day cricket until September and the 2023 World Cup starting the month after, it’s a decent time to take stock. In the last two years they’ve played 27, won 14 and lost 11 with two no results.

You can read this period two ways. You could say they’ve been struggling to get back up to speed after losing their greatest-ever captain, Eoin Morgan. Alternatively, you could say they’re such a well-drilled outfit that they’ve felt comfortable giving new players opportunities and just generally pissing about with team selection without sweating results too much. There’s probably truth in both.

Player churn

England have used 37 players in one-day internationals (ODIs) in the last two years and that’s only partly explained by that time they had to magic-up a whole new squad for the series against Pakistan after the first-choice one was sidelined by a bunch of coronavirus cases.

Their already established taste for rest and rotation meant it wasn’t even that weird a squad when they did that. Ben Stokes was captain; Dawid Malan and James Vince were in there; so too were Ben Duckett, Phil Salt and Saqib Mahmood.

To contextualise the churn a bit, five players have played only a single match in the last two years. One of those is new arrival Rehan Ahmed and another is Chris Jordan. Basically, England have chopped and changed enough that even when players have been left out, they’ve generally come back in again.

A happy short-term byproduct of all this rest, recovery and rotation is that it’s been pretty easy to keep everyone happy. Because there’s always someone being omitted for reasons other than poor form, England have been able to give 12 or 13 players the illusion that they’re first choice picks.

But now a World Cup is looming, so again that question: What actually is England’s first-choice XI?

The batters

Jason Roy was left out of the T20 World Cup squad, but appears to have retained his 50-over spot. He’s responded to the show of faith by hitting hundreds against the Netherlands, South Africa and Bangladesh, which presumably means he’s still a first-choice pick at the top of the order.

The same goes for Jonny Bairstow, when fit, as he has a pretty strong case to be considered England’s greatest-ever one-day batter and still seems to be at the peak of his powers.

With an average of over 50, Joe Root can also consider himself one of England’s all-time greats in the middle format. But then Dawid Malan has hit four hundreds and averaged near enough 60 in the last two years. Maybe one or the other could bat at four?

The problem is you can only push the difficult decisions so far down the order before eventually something has to give. England seem set on picking three bowlers plus three all-rounders, which means frontline bowling options have to start at number six in the batting order if you haven’t got one in already. That means Jos Buttler at five and no place for Harry Brook. Even if Brook’s excellence has largely been in the formats either side of this one, that omission seems a bit mad right now.

How can a team that’s won barely half its games in the last two years not find a spot for Harry Brook?

The bowlers

There’s half an answer when you start looking at who’s been taking wickets for England these last couple of years. Top of the list is Adil Rashid with 28 – no surprises there – but next comes David Willey with 24.

Rashid, Sam Curran and Moeen Ali are the only bowlers to have played more often than Willey. So does this mean he’s in the first choice XI? He’s not just been playing, after all – he’s been performing too, taking those wickets at an average of 24.37.

But then eight wickets came in three games against the Netherlands and his last two appearances saw returns of 0-63 off nine overs against Australia and 0-38 off six against South Africa. There weren’t many bowling successes in those two matches, but even so. It’s not a clear picture.

Willey has been getting lots of games without necessarily being a first choice pick. It’s all very muddy. Of the seamers who played in the 2019 World Cup final, Chris Woakes has played eight games in two years, Jofra Archer four and Mark Wood six.

Brydon Carse has played nine games in that time.

The first XI

The management of top England players’ workloads has created opportunities. While that deepens the pool of players with international experience, it also adds complexity and makes fair comparisons harder. You can pick almost any contender for a 2023 World Cup spot and their case for inclusion is far from straightforward.

It used to be fun to pick an England team – you always felt you could do a better job than the selectors – but that’s no longer the case. These days there are so many variables, it makes comparing apples and oranges seem an essentially fair and manageable undertaking.

Modern England team selection is a laborious near-impossible data sifting nightmare where you can guarantee criticism afterwards and also have to accept that a proportion of those critics will be right – even if only on a ‘stopped clock is right twice a day’ basis.

How do you weigh Harry Brook’s recent Test performances in Pakistan against Dawid Malan’s one-day showings in Bangladesh? Does Chris Woakes’ extensive ODI experience actually have a bit of a hole in it given that only five of his 112 caps were in India? Is Jofra Archer sufficiently recovered that he’ll last the tournament? Would Dawid Malan bat as effectively as an opener?

Whose record has been bolstered in lower pressure matches? Whose has been diminished by too heavy a playing commitment at one time or another?

Imagine juggling all of this with all of these players’ hopes and dreams at stake. Imagine trying to explain your decisions to the ones who miss out.

People are fearful of their jobs being made redundant by machines, but honestly, who wants this shit? Get Skynet to pick the team.

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The second Test was “a differently played game” according to Ben Stokes. It still resulted in England winning in Pakistan though, which is not a thing that had happened too often until this month.

The match has left us with quite a few half-baked thoughts rolling around our largely empty head. Rather than waiting for them to coalesce into something coherent, let’s opt for premature spewing instead.

It is good to play in Pakistan. It is good to play in different places

There was a great feel to England’s T20 tour of Pakistan a few months ago. (Here’s our recap.) It was not just that it was hotly-contested. It was hotly-contested at least to some degree because it felt like such a rare and exciting thing for everyone involved.

While that was England’s first visit to Pakistan in pure time, the Test tour has retained that same feel as crowds have been great and because these remain unfamiliar conditions now that we’re onto the five-day stuff. This brings a freshness to proceedings – you just don’t know how each match will go.

It’s not just that this England team are going about things in an interesting way. Being somewhere less familiar actually magnifies that. The moral of this is not just that it’s good to come and play in Pakistan; it’s that it’s good to go and play in all sorts of different places, against all sorts of different teams.

Different durations, different bowlers, different batters, different pitches, different places. Variety has always been, and should always remain, cricket’s greatest strength.

Pakistan are very much doing their bit

We don’t think it’s too one-eyed to suggest that Pakistan are the junior partner in the making-the-series-worth-watching stakes. Junior maybe, but still vital.

Without Pakistan’s titanic first innings batting, England’s helter-skelter last minute victory in the first Test would have been a far less dramatic and unnecessarily-paced win. In this Test Pakistan brought Abrar Ahmed into our world and then got within 26 runs of chasing 355 in the fourth innings.

It always takes two teams to make a fun Test series.

England are bowling sides out

It’s masked a little by the carpet bombing batting approach, but England’s bowlers are really performing of late. It’s now 17 Test innings in a row that they’ve bowled out the opposition. That’s no mean feat.

A key part of this is of course the batting however. England haven’t really struggled for bowlers these last few years – even when they’ve been shit – it’s just that they’ve generally had nothing to bowl at. Making actual runs is therefore proving very helpful. Doing so quickly also tends to mean that it’s either 10 wickets or defeat – time hasn’t often come into the equation.

The attack is being used in a clear-minded way too.

Ben Stokes is very much not Joe Root as a captain

Yesterday we tweeted and tooted how the Root to Stokes captaincy switch has provided a strong argument both against and in favour of making your best player captain. Stokes has been incredible and deserves plenty of plaudits, but we can’t help but think that everyone is being awfully nice in not highlighting the incredible contrast with Root’s stint in charge.

Root famously started out as “Craptain” and somehow descended from there. Wispy and ethereal was our verdict on his leadership when he finally stood down. And it was pretty clearly deeply unfun playing under him towards the end too. It feels a bit mean to dredge this up because Root’s fallen into line under Stokes without a hint of ego and is visibly enjoying himself, engaging in airborne arse-bumps with Mark Wood to celebrate wickets and the like. He’s such an admirable cricketer and person in so many ways.

But we can’t help it. We just keep getting all these reminders that trigger visions of a parallel timeline where Root’s still in charge.

In Pakistan’s first innings, James Anderson bowled two overs with the new ball, took a wicket in the second of them, and then didn’t reappear until the 29th over of the innings. Second time around, his first over was the 16th of the innings and his sixth was the 60th.

If that first innings usage seems a bit clever-clever and overly committed to a reverse swing strategy (he could surely have bowled a third over with the new ball with a full night’s sleep not long away) then just imagine how Root would have used Anderson in this match. Regardless of whether he was still in his right-arm fast-medium phase or not, Jimmy would have been used anything but sparingly.

What we’re saying is that this is what England fans could have – this or something very like it – but instead they’ve got Ben Stokes. Enjoy it.

Harry Brook is doing the early Joe Root thing with knobs on

Another Root comparison to finish. England have had a fair few Massive Young Talents come into the team over the years and every player acclimatises to international cricket differently. Ollie Pope’s made an erratic start. Jonny Bairstow was all over the place before mastering one-day cricket and then becoming unstoppable in Tests this summer. You may or may not be old enough (or perhaps you’re too old) to recall that Root’s arrival was characterised by him looking weirdly untroubled.

After 73 and 20 not out on Test debut against India in 2012, he went into his first spell of one-day internationals early the following year and made successive scores of 36, 39, 57 not out, 31, 56, 79 not out and 28 not out. Even if he wasn’t dominating, he looked like a man who had gone up a level of cricket and it was just absolutely no big thing.

There is a whiff of this in how Harry Brook has arrived at the bar and put in an absolutely gigantic order. Three Tests in, he has made 153 off 116 balls, 87 off 65 balls and then 108 off 145 balls. He’s hit six fours in six balls and somehow that wasn’t even his most productive over.

Brook had (quite understandably given how it’s been working for him) been overly aggressive in the first innings of this match, but second dig he recalibrated to the extent that he only scored four runs off his first 26 balls and 13 off his first 41. Then he started hitting fours and sixes again, like it was some weirdly easy thing.

Yes, it’s early days, but by the yorker of Waqar he’s packed a lot into them.

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When the opposition make 550, it’s rarely because of a missed catch. It’s more a result of all the other chances that weren’t even created. At the same time, an innings of 550 will tend to feature a fair few misses, if only because it’s such a huge volume of cricket.

England missed a whole bunch of chances during New Zealand’s innings in the second Test. That’s very unhelpful, but the silver lining is that it can also be funny.

Remember the rich tapestry of emotions when Stuart Broad dropped yet another catch off James Anderson against Pakistan a couple of summers ago? That was really funny. Funny for how awful it was, yes – but still funny.

The backdrop to that one was that Rory Burns, in the slips, missed an easy catch and it went for four and then Zak Crawley, also in the slips, missed another chance later the same over. This is what gave Broad dropping an absolute dolly an over later its extraordinary emotional impact on all involved.

This is also how we got a couple of nice England slip catching moments at Trent Bridge this week. Several England fielders – chiefly Joe Root – swapped their hands for buttered cymbals early in the match and by the time the following misses came about, everyone was a bit fed up.

That’s the key ingredient really: overwhelming fed-upness.

Moment 1: Stuart Broad’s anguish

Bowlers never like seeing a chance go down, but sometimes they are capable of clinging to the logical truth that team-mates do not mean to drop the ball.

And then other times they are very much not able to remember that. Like when neither Jonny Bairstow nor Zak Crawley so much as moves a muscle as the ball passes between them.

Here is Stuart Broad’s initial reaction in which astonishment and frustration are vying for supremacy and together just about suppressing blind fury.

And here’s Broad half a second later when he’s had time to fully absorb what has happened and calibrate his emotions accordingly.

100% pure anguish.

And that tiny beige something that appears to be coming out of his mouth? That’s the last flecks of his spirit departing his body, that is.

Moment 2: Joe Root finally catches a cricket ball

With New Zealand 496-5, Joe Root finally, belatedly clung onto one.

Root has played plenty of Test matches. He has caught a lot of balls. He has dropped a lot of balls. You’d think a short spell of fielding rubbishness would be the kind of thing he’d shrug off and probably not even acknowledge really.

Absolutely not. Joe Root was stewing on his missed catches and apparently felt that the ball itself was a key protagonist in his tale of woe.

We’re honestly not sure we’ve ever seen someone focus their celebration at the ball before now.

“Ahhhhhh! In your FACE, ball! I caught you! I caught your stitchy red leather arse!”

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Everything’s amazing and fun and positive under the new England captain. Remember that previous guy? Man was he a miserable arsehole. Didn’t have a clue, did he? Whatever happened to him?

Sometimes you accidentally reveal something about the past.

We remember being on this cookery course in Thailand once with a handful of other tourists. During one of the breaks, one of them asked another if she was Dutch.

If we remember correctly, the woman was actually Canadian, but she wanted to know why she came across as Dutch.

“Oh you can quite often spot a Dutch person,” said the girl, who was from the Netherlands herself. “If you see a dark-haired couple camping and their kids are blonde, they’ll be Dutch.”

If she’d left it there, it would have been a bit weird but okay. Instead, she proceeded to run through a whole load of other scenarios and fine detail. Much of it was pretty funny, in the way these pet theories often are.

It came across like a stand-up comedy routine and towards the end, with everyone giggling away, she emphasised that the most important quality was that a Dutch person would always, pretty much without fail, “look a bit wrong somehow”.

And then we all sat in uncomfortable silence trying to work out if any of the other qualities she’d identified potentially applied to the Canadian woman or whether this was perhaps the only one.

“There’s been a good vibe,” said James Anderson after Ben Stokes’ and Brendon McCullum’s first match in charge. “I’ve enjoyed the positivity.”

“It’s been one of the most fun weeks we’ve had as a team,” said Stuart Broad.

Everyone seems aware of this. Moeen Ali has said he’d be open to unretiring. Adil Rashid is keen to play.

This is all highly lovely and everything, but when we hear these comments and see these developments, all we can think of is what they say about the preceding years.

This is the problem with saying how great and amazing things are now. There’s an implication that things really weren’t that great and amazing before.

It’s pretty obvious that England weren’t having a load of fun when they were losing every single game – and fair enough really. The issue comes when players start fiddling about with cause and effect and suggesting that performances are improving BECAUSE the team has started having fun. There may well be truth in that, but it also kind of implies that all of the previous losing was because Joe Root and Chris Silverwood were making everyone miserable.

You can get away with the Silverwood bit because he’s off in Sri Lanka now, trying to deal with a very different palette of problems. But Root’s right there. He’s right there in the same changing room as you, listening to you imply that his captaincy made the team more rubbish than it actually was.

This works another way too. It’s not just comments made about the present that can alter perceptions of the past; comments made about the past can also reflect on the present.

In the wake of Root’s latest hundred, Ben Stokes suggested that the batter perhaps felt like he’d had “the weight of the world lifted from his shoulders” by passing on the captaincy.

So where’s that weight now, Atlas?

(Point of order: Atlas didn’t actually carry the world; he held up the heavens, which are often depicted as a celestial sphere in art. We wouldn’t especially want to be condemned to carrying either ourself. We struggled enough with a very large flagstone yesterday. The celestial sphere is presumably pretty gassy and therefore maybe not that heavy, but by the beard of Zeus, it’s got to be unwieldy, hasn’t it?)

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The England Test team is going to remain awash with problems for quite some time to come. The best you can hope for as a fan is that they at least keep those problems fresh and interesting. The Joe Root captaincy problem was getting a bit stale, so at least now we get to complain about something different.

How would you assess Root’s stint as Test captain? We’ll remember him as a man who was in charge for more games than any other England captain and still somehow seemed new to the job, right to the very end.

He had his strengths – there was no mutiny and he scored a shit-tonne of runs – but there was a wispy, ethereal quality to his leadership. He was a captain who got blown around by even the slightest breeze.

Ask yourself this: What is a Root team? How does Joe Root believe you should set about Test cricket?

After 64 games, we have no clue. Back when Ed Smith was national selector, the team was set up for what we called total bits and pieces cricket. They picked multiple all-rounders and in so doing put together six- or seven-man bowling attacks that were about the most varied England have ever fielded.

Root was in charge then. And he was also in charge for the repeated monomaniacal ploy of picking five right-arm fast-medium bowlers – a demented trend that climaxed in Adelaide this winter.

Sit those two extremes alongside each other and “in charge” seems entirely the wrong term. Root was figurehead and spokesperson, but it’s hard to see how he shaped or led his team. He was a hollow strategist and routinely one step behind with his on-field tactics.

This is the second time in a row we’ve been pretty unforgiving about Root’s captaincy after predicting he had captained his last Test a couple of weeks ago. We feel a bit bad about that, because he has been game and eager and committed and resilient and up against some almighty challenges with Covid and England’s schedule and the batters and all that.

But he also hasn’t really been up to the job. There’s no shame in that. Captaincy is a different thing. Sometimes promotion takes you into a role that bears little relation to the one you’ve previously been excelling in.

So who should be the next England captain?

We’re honestly not that bothered. There is clearly no right answer.

Ben Stokes is probably the favourite; Ben Stokes, six cricketers in one, who plays all three formats and who sacked off cricket completely for a good chunk of last year because he simply couldn’t take it any more. A Ben Stokes captaincy would certainly take some innovative management.

Stuart Broad is another possibility from within the team – although ‘within the team’ is masking a little there in that he wasn’t in the squad for the last series and was regularly omitted from the first XI even before that.

James Anderson? Similar story – and he knows the rules anyway.

Jos Buttler? Again, not in the team and whatever his leadership qualities, he’s never really worked out how to approach Test cricket even as an individual. Not sure you’d want him shaping the team’s whole philosophy.

Rory Burns? Yet another not in the team – although his mediocre Test record is at least mediocre and therefore probably worthy of a recall. Dunno. Does he even want the job? Guess it would guarantee him a Test spot for a few months, so maybe he would.

Some rando from county cricket? No more or less awful an option than the others really. But who? Is anyone out there really sufficiently worldly and authoritative to manhandle the England Test team towards competence?

That brings us to Moeen Ali. Moeen knows Test cricket and knows captaincy. He has played everywhere and done everything. In many ways he’s the best man for the job… except for the small matter of having retired from Test cricket.

So…?

Of those options, we probably like Moeen the best, but he is only really an option in a theoretical sense.

One thing we are sure of is that this probably shouldn’t be a grand coronation. England always try and appoint someone who they think can remain in charge for many years to come. As we’ve seen with Root, there isn’t really much to be gained from sacrificing competence at the altar of longevity. So don’t do it. Pick someone for the short- or medium-term and be up front about that. Accept that with circumstances as they are, you may as well concentrate on the here and now. We’ve had various four-year plans and all they’ve delivered is ample fodder for ridicule. Let’s freewheel to the next away Ashes humiliation!

It’s quite possible to crown a Hussain, a Vaughan or a Strauss when you can identify players who will almost certainly play every Test match for the next few years. This is a different team and, arguably, a different era too with the proliferation of fixtures. That probably calls for a different approach.

What’s wrong with just picking someone to do the job for a little bit and seeing how they go? You could give Rory Burns the summer in charge, for example, and then take stock ahead of the winter. Maybe he turns out shite. Or maybe you like the cut of his jib.

Or think about how Australia have approached things. Rather than be tied to convention, they’ve picked Pat Cummins who has openly said that he’s willing to delegate on-field tactics to someone else. That’s not heresy. That’s being open-minded.

England apparently can’t have Broad or Anderson as captain because it’s unlikely they’ll play every game. So what? Make it a job share. Make one captain and one vice captain and plan for the latter to routinely cover for the former at some point in every series. As long as Broad’s the official captain, that arrangement shouldn’t result in the chaos of a coup.

The point is, there are things you can do. There are ways to approach this problem if you’re willing to do something other than commit to a batter to lead England into the 2025/26 Ashes. England are simply not in that situation. They need to gather information and let things unfold.

Put it this way: if you were picking a batter to lead England into the 2025/26 Ashes, the most logical option would be Joe Root.

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England’s tour of the West Indies gets underway on Tuesday with the hotly-anticipated match against TBA. Three Test matches follow during which we may or may not get answers to these five fiendishly difficult questions.

(1) Is this a ‘development tour’ or not?

Development tour? Who said ‘development tour’? Actually, Joe Root did, in classic “We didn’t burn him!” fashion.

“I don’t want this to sound like a development tour at all but…” said England’s captain, before saying a few other things.

England’s repeated inability to see a Test series in the West Indies as a major challenge is pretty impressive when you consider that they’ve only managed to win there once in the last 52 years. (In recent times those two things are of course not unconnected.)

There’s some particularly mad doublethink going on this time around. Root went from explaining how omitting James Anderson and Stuart Broad provided an opportunity to learn about other players and, “strengthen what could be backbone of this team moving forward,” to confidently stating: “You don’t want to look too far ahead. Ultimately, we’ve got to look after what’s right in front of us.”

Which is it, Joe?

The more we think about “planning for life without Broad and Anderson” the less we understand it. Why the big need for planning? You chop and change bowlers literally every single match anyway? You’ve used nine pace bowlers in the last 12 months of Test matches without even trying.

(2) Have England finally found a number three?

After averaging 66 at number four in 2021, Root feels he’s ready to solve England’s problems at number three.

He probably is. Hurray!

(3) Can England find a number four?

How in blazing hot Hell are England going to find a batter who can average anywhere close to 66 at four?

(4) Can Chris Woakes take wickets with a new red Dukes ball?

Because that’s what he’ll be trying to do.

While outlining some of the things England could learn from this series, Root said that, “Guys like Chris Woakes and others will get the opportunity to bowl with a brand new ball in a Test match in away conditions.”

Away conditions, yes – but they use the Dukes ball in the West Indies; the Dukes ball with which Woakes has taken 94 Test wickets in England at 22.63.

Suppose you don’t want to change too many variables when you’re running an experiment.

(5) What is still in the selection room?

This is a real poser. Commenting on the selection meeting in which England decided to soft-bin Anderson and Broad, Root said: “Sometimes we have been slightly too honest and certain things should stay in the room.”

So what is still in that room? Root’s comment implies that in failing to take it with them, they have somehow been dishonest. Have Root, Strauss et al disposed of something?

Is it some kind of littering? Have England’s interim management team embraced littering?

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The England Test team run by Joe Root and Chris Silverwood is not big on picking spinners. It is even less big on picking Jack Leach. A rare appearance in the first Ashes Test saw the left-armer get walloped, so how comfortable will the two head honchos be about picking him again? Perhaps the two of them should consider going back in time to try and build their first-choice spinner up a bit.

It seems fair to say that Root has a somewhat peculiar record when it comes to managing the spinners available to him. Adil Rashid was binned at the start of his captaincy before being brought back again on more than one occasion. It was also during his tenure that England gave three consecutive Test caps to spinners: Mason Crane, Jack Leach and Dom Bess.

Moeen Ali appeared to be one man who was at least sometimes blessed with the confidence of his captain – but how much of that was down to his spin bowling and how much due to his magnificent malleability?

For his part, Leach has never especially let anyone down, but he has been left out in the name of team balance so many times he must be starting to think he’s made of dark matter.

Sometimes England think Leach’s batting unbalances them, even though he once made 92 opening the batting in a Test and also hit the greatest 1 not out you’re ever likely to see.

On other occasions they convince themselves that the mere inclusion of a spinner unbalances them – a bizarre belief that seems to have manifested itself ever more frequently in the Silverwood era. His England teams have now played without one on half a dozen occasions. Not smart.

The upshot is that Jack Leach is the first-choice spinner who England would do almost anything not to pick. And now he has been savaged.

What does that mean, both now and into the future? Does it mean that Root and Silverwood were justified in their reluctance to trust him? Or have they in fact missed a whole host of opportunities to build up their best spinner so that he had more to fall back on when times got tough? More experience, more self-confidence, more goodwill from the men who pass judgement on his worth from one game to the next? All of these things come as a package.

England’s management team will no doubt talk supportively. Bowling coach Jon Lewis has already called Leach “a pretty resilient fella” – which is just as well given the team’s broader attitude to him and his art. Root and/or Silverwood will presumably back him in some way or other after the Test too. But these are just words.

Actions are famously more audible and this England team have opted to play without any kind of spinner on no fewer than six occasions. They have played without Leach a great many more times. At what point during a Test does a bowler start to dwell on the fact that his foundations are built on quicksand? After the match? After 10 overs? After being hit for the first six?

Leach averaged 29.98 going into this series, but he last played a Test in March. He has shown himself to be be a pretty good bowler, but it’s hard to move from ‘pretty good’ to ‘good’ when you’re only picked in conditions that suit you. Leach is not great on flat pitches and the way Root and Silverwood treat him, he never will be.

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“Oh that’s a nothing shot,” they say – but only when you get out to it.

We were thinking about this particular shot of Joe Root’s after watching the BBC highlights the other day.

The BBC highlights are an hour long and with no ads, it’s what you might call a ‘good hour’ rather than the 42-minute timespan you may well perceive as being a TV hour.

Even so, this particular shot of Root’s seemed to account for about a third of the footage.

It wasn’t one particular eye-catching stroke that they replayed endlessly. It was one, mundane nudge that he himself replayed endlessly.

England now seem to have started producing pretty dense, targeted highlights montages for social media. The one for Root’s latest hundred illustrates the frequency of this little shot of his even more starkly.

There’s actually probably two shots you’ll notice. The one we’re not talking about is the manufactured work to leg. This shot is sufficiently whippy that Root is almost as likely to attract the adjective ‘wristy’ as an Asian batter who absolutely does not use their wrists at all. (Trust us, that’s pretty wristy.)

(Quick digression on wristiness. It occurs to us that as well as being a quality that is attributed to batsmen more on the basis of ethnicity than technique, there are also specific ways of using the wrists that are for some reason considered wristier than others. For example, Root’s method – suddenly closing the face to manoeuvre the ball into the leg side – is far more likely to attract the term than Jos Buttler’s golf chip power snap which is typically deployed within an otherwise straightforward full-face-of-the-bat type stroke.)

The shot we’re talking about here is however the off-side drop-nudge for a single. You know the one. Watch the video and you’ll know the one.

The ball is on – or more likely just outside – off stump. Displaying the full inside-edge of his bat, Root pushes at it with no real force. The ball limply plops towards a patch of grass where nobody is standing and he runs to the other end. That’s it.

Sometimes he plays it off the front foot. Sometimes he plays it off the back foot. Sometimes he plays it to pace. Sometimes he plays it to spin. Sometimes he sort of jumps backwards and plays it on the move, springing forward into the run as he lands.

In a way it is many shots, but it is also in another sense just the one shot. Because it is a shot that if he were ever to get out to it – ball nowhere near the stumps, bat angled to entice the slip fielders, nothing much to be gained bar a single run – the commentators would be duty-bound to describe it as “a nothing shot”.

Yet repeated frequently and reliably enough, Root’s nothing shot keeps him scoring until he has yet another hundred.

You could be tempted to call it a bread and butter shot. Except that would only really make sense if everyone else thought that eating bread and butter could get you killed.

> Did you see… Joe Root standing at the other end?

Busy day. Lots of wickets and even one or two deliveries that didn’t result in wickets. Somewhere in amongst it all, Joe Root took 5-8.

For many people, the best part of Root’s spell was the moment when he had 3-0.

For other people, the best part was the perfect-o-ball he bowled from the round the wicket to Washington Sundar that pitched on middle stump and hit off.

These were not the best parts of Joe Root’s 5-8.

The best part occurred when he took the next wicket. The best part was how Dom Sibley celebrated when he caught Axar Patel.

Let’s take a look.

What you have to remember before we get into this is that Patel’s dismissal came when the game was going absolutely NUTS.

India had just gone from 114-3 to 125-7 in what Boris Becker calls “the blinking of one eye”.

Sibley was duly – and entirely understandably – carried away by a veritable TSUNAMI OF EMOTION.

Here’s how it went down.

Axar Patel drilled Root pretty much straight to Sibley and Sibley caught it.

It was a big moment.

Plans in tatters, ridiculed as no-hopers, England were fighting back.

India were imploding. Imploding spectacularly.

England were BACK IN IT.

Now here’s Sibley’s celebratory throw.

See the ball soar!

See Sibley leap with glee as his elated team-mates descend on him!

It’s safe to say that Dom Sibley is not a man who allows his emotions to overcome him.