Joe Root is to be the new captain of the England Test team. The England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) has appointed him just over a month after Ben Stokes announced his retirement midway through a Test match, and almost three weeks before England next take the field against Pakistan at Headingley on 19 August.
There are, to put it mildly, very good reasons to doubt the wisdom of this appointment. One is that we’ve tried this before and it didn’t work
There are, to put it mildly, very good reasons to doubt the wisdom of this appointment. One is that we’ve tried this before and it didn’t work. Root was captain from 2017 until 2022 and early on in his tenure it became obvious that he was ill-suited to the job. Nevertheless, he was kept on for years.
With Root in charge, we lost two Ashes series and failed to regain the urn in a third, as well as losing three series against New Zealand and two away series against the West Indies. Root’s batting suffered too: his Test average was markedly lower as captain than it has been since, and he admitted that he had developed ‘a very unhealthy relationship’ with the job and that it had ‘started to take a bad toll on my own personal health’. Yet none of that mattered. We were repeatedly told that there was no alternative. In truth, the suits simply could not bring themselves to admit that they had appointed the wrong man.
