Joe Root: ‘Brilliant captain’ Stokes has total respect of England dressing room

Joe Root says Ben Stokes retains the total respect of the England dressing room but would not be drawn on whether he should return as captain.

Root is standing in for Stokes at the Oval for the second Test against New Zealand starting on Wednesday after the captain was left out of the side, along with Gus Atkinson, for a breach of curfew following the victory at Lord’s nine days ago.

Root captained England in 64 Tests between 2017 and 2022, stepping down having developed an “unhealthy relationship” with the job.

He felt there was only a “0.1 per cent” chance of ever leading the Test team again and said he had to dig his captain’s blazer out from a “cupboard in the garage”. He joked: “It was a bit creased when I got it down. There were about 30 team sheets in the pocket I had to take out.”

Root says that he has taken the job on a “game-by-game basis”. Unlike Brendon McCullum on Monday, he did not cast doubt over Stokes’s mental state.

“The first thing, from my point of view, whenever something happens like that, is you want to make sure that everyone involved is OK,” he said. “I spoke to him a number of times over the last week or so. We’re close friends, and I think they should stay as privileged conversations between me and him. That should stay that way.”

Asked if Stokes had the respect of the dressing room, Root said: “I’m sure he has the respect of everyone in our dressing room. He’s been a phenomenal leader for the last four years. The way he’s captained has been brilliant. We’ve achieved some wonderful things as a team, and as a group, and won a hell of a lot of Test matches. He’s a talismanic player and a great friend to a number of the guys and, of course, there’s a huge amount of respect there from everyone.”

McCullum and director of cricket Rob Key refused to back Stokes as captain, and Root pushed the question up the food chain. He said: “I don’t think it’s fair for me to make those kind of decisions and answer those kind of questions. They are decisions for people that are in a slightly different job to me.”

Root argued the perception that England have a “drinking culture” is unfair, but accepted players had “let themselves down”. Root was one of the players who returned home before the midnight curfew after the first Test, with Stokes and Atkinson staying later.

“I’m not someone that can make those kind of calls but from a personal point of view, it has been disappointing,” he said. “There have been a few occasions as a team we’ve let ourselves down, and we’ve let each other down. And we have to learn from those mistakes and make sure that we understand that we shouldn’t be putting ourselves in those situations.

“I also don’t think it’s a fair reflection of our dressing room. It’s an incredibly professional dressing room that works extremely hard, that turns up and puts everything into each and every training day. We’ve got to try and show that to everyone, first and foremost in the way we go about things and how we play and put a performance in out on the field.”

Root admitted that he had been “slightly envious” of the opportunity to work with McCullum as a captain.

“I think I am in a very different place to when I finished. It is going to be a really fun week. I am looking forward to getting out on the field and for us to get playing again. I have really enjoyed the last couple of days working with Baz [McCullum] in a slightly different space. That is one thing, in a small way, in a good way I was slightly envious of that opportunity to work with someone like Baz in this sort of capacity.”

An England spokesman confirmed on Tuesday that Stokes and Atkinson were free to play county cricket while out of the England side. Both men are expected to play for their counties, Durham and Surrey respectively, from Friday, which is day three of the Test.

Root said England were still waiting to hear to whether Jamie Smith’s second child had been born, and whether he would make his debut. The uncapped James Rew is on standby to come into an England side already containing two debutants, Jordan Cox and Sonny Baker.

Root was not as bad a captain as you remember

To the surprise of almost everyone, including the man himself, this week Joe Root will dust off his old blue blazer and captain England for a record 65th time, four years after he last did a job that comes with unique pressures and scrutiny.

Root’s time in charge, like most England captaincies, ended badly. Finishing with a grim game in Grenada, he won just one of his last 17 matches. He was left broken by a job with which he had developed “a very unhealthy relationship”. His words.

In the four years since, Root has racked up runs like never before. Under Ben Stokes and Brendon McCullum, England have played with a greater dynamism and imagination and, generally, enjoyed better results. As a result, the broad-brush view of Root is: fine man, great batsman, poor captain.

It is not fair. Root was far from perfect. He could be wooden on-field; his teams flip-flopped in terms of identity; he could be indecisive with his selection whims; and when handed a new toy – Jofra Archer – in 2019, he could not stop playing with it and eventually it broke in New Zealand. But Root was nowhere near as bad a captain as you remember.

Root did the job at a very tough time. In fact, he was almost permanently hamstrung in one way or another. When he took over the captaincy in 2017, England’s focus was not on retaining the Ashes that winter, but winning the home World Cup in 2019. At the end of his first summer in the job, Stokes became embroiled in an 11-month courtroom saga over his Bristol nightclub brawl that cost him a shot at the Ashes when in his prime. Aged just 26, Root carried a heavy load on that tour, which he finished lying in a darkened Sydney dressing room in 40C heat, having picked up a gastro bug at his son’s first birthday party a few days earlier.

Three years into Root’s reign, along came Covid. At this time, players effectively became guinea pigs, living in biosecure bubbles that kept the lights on but drained their love of the game. Six months into the pandemic, with players clocking up days in hotel-room quarantine, England took to “resting and rotating” players in Sri Lanka and India, meaning Root never had his best team.

That summer, the toll of Covid and the death of his father caught up with Stokes, who took a mental health break. Root was as stoic and kind as ever, but he was shorn of his key player. Stokes returned, not quite himself physically or emotionally, for that winter’s Ashes, when England’s exhausted players were made to endure more brutal Covid protocols before and during the tour. By then, another layer of complexity had been added for Root, with the racism scandal swamping his county Yorkshire and, eventually, the wider game.

The final challenge Root faced was the burden he carried for the team’s batting. In a window before Harry Brook and after Alastair Cook’s prime, the only time he had a truly world-class batting colleague in his batting order was Stokes between 2019 and 2020. In 2021, when he made 1,708 runs at 61, England’s next best performer was Rory Burns with 530. Third? That was extras with 412. Through rest and rotation and selection chaos, England used 25 players that year, but only one other even averaged 30 (Dawid Malan’s 34.2).

It is worth wondering what Root could have done with a coach tailored to him. He inherited Trevor Bayliss, the laid-back Australian charged with winning the World Cup. Bayliss was perfect for white-ball Eoin Morgan, who controlled the team environment completely, but Root needed someone a bit more hands-on to provide direction, such as Andy Flower. When Bayliss left after the drawn 2019 Ashes, Root was paired with Chris Silverwood, another amiable Yorkshireman who lacked the charisma or strategic vision to give the team an identity.

Root also lacked leaders in the ranks, which meant he did the job too long, colouring how we look at his record. Stokes was in and out, while James Anderson and Stuart Broad did things their own way. That hideous run of one in 17 – which featured seven games against India and five against Australia – arrived just as a captaincy should naturally have been ending. Before that run, Root had captained England 47 times (winning 26, a very fine record). That is about time to call stumps for an England captain this century: Nasser Hussain did 43 matches, Michael Vaughan 51, Andrew Strauss 45, and Cook 57. Root went on too long, in large part because of a lack of alternatives.

The captaincy, Root said, took “a bad toll on my own personal health” and left him as “not the best husband or father”. This particular circumstance, helping out his struggling mate Stokes whilst protecting the young buck Brook, was perhaps the only situation in which he would have returned, which speaks to that deep sense of duty. As Rob Key said last week, it is always Root “getting England out of a hole”, whether they are 20 for two or seeking a steady hand at the tiller. McCullum praised the sense of calm Root had brought to his team talks since taking over again. He has seen it all.

On the field, do not be surprised to see Brook collaborating closely on tactics, much like the more imaginative Steve Smith does for Pat Cummins. But it is Root who will be the team’s kindly face at a time of crisis. He brought many qualities to the job first time round, and he will need them all again this week.

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