Joe Root has admitted English players no longer experience enough 50-over cricket either for their counties or their country to go into global tournaments with any realistic prospect of success.
England are bottom of the World Cup table after Afghanistan’s eight-wicket victory over Pakistan , having lost three of their opening four games. Root’s experience illustrates the fading focus on the format since they hosted and won the tournament in 2019.
In the summer of 2017 alone Root played 14 one-day internationals and a further five games for Yorkshire in the Royal London One-Day Cup. But he has since played only once in that competition, in 2018, while squeezing just 16 ODIs into the three and a half years between February 2020 and his arrival in India at the end of last month. “Whether it’s domestically or internationally, I don’t think we play enough of it if we’re going to continue to compete in World Cups,” he said.
While the 32-year-old is clear that “I don’t want it to be seen as an excuse” for England’s recent failings, he said the lack of games has had a profound impact on the team. “We definitely would have benefited from more 50-over cricket,” he added. “It would have been nice to have a proper run-in over a six-month period, where you slowly work things through as a group.” A further issue, Root said, was that “when you’re not playing the format, it’s hard to know who the best players are”.
Amid rumours that the Hundred – which runs concurrently with an enfeebled One-Day Cup – may end up being reformatted as a T20 tournament, Root suggested that the Blast could make way in the domestic schedule for a 50-over competition, though “there’s talk of whether this format is relevant any more anyway”.
“It’s got a huge amount of history and it brings a lot to cricket,” Root said. “It will always hold a very special part of my heart for what it’s given me throughout my career. I think its [future] is a question that should be posed to the next generation of players, and to everyone watching the game. It shouldn’t be down to: ‘Is it bringing the most money for the sport?’ It should be down to what people want to watch, and what’s going to engage the next generation of players.”
England’s lack of proper pre-tournament preparation has clearly not helped their World Cup campaign – though the only other team that arrived similarly undercooked was South Africa, who have not found it such a hindrance. In the six months before the tournament, and discounting the series against Ireland last month played with a reserve squad, England scheduled just four ODIs, one fewer than South Africa. Meanwhile Sri Lanka lined up 17, Bangladesh 14, Pakistan 13, India and New Zealand 12, Afghanistan 11 and both Australia and the Netherlands eight.
The result has been not just disappointing individual performances, but confusion about the team’s direction and selection. Their uncertainty is demonstrated by the fact that England went into their opening game with four all-rounders in Moeen Ali, Liam Livingstone, Sam Curran and Chris Woakes, giving the side tremendous batting depth. But just two weeks later all of them were out and England were dealing with a long tail.
Jos Buttler has won two tosses and made two desperately bad decisions, deciding on both occasions to bowl first, and his team has handled their run chases terribly. Against Afghanistan Buttler erroneously assumed conditions would change to benefit batting later in the day, and against South Africa he threw his side into the full furnace of a Mumbai heatwave, in which they promptly wilted.
“I’ve not played in anything like that before,” Root said of a day when the temperature in Mumbai peaked at 37.4C (99F), the third hottest October day in a decade. “I’ve played in hotter conditions, and probably more humid conditions, but it just felt like you couldn’t get your breath. It was like you were eating the air.”
Root feels it is too soon to criticise Buttler, and that England’s white-ball captain has suffered from unfair comparisons with his predecessor, Eoin Morgan. “The way Morgs instilled a completely different culture, and the way we looked at white-ball cricket, was a once-in-a-generation bit of thinking,” Root said. “For Jos to be compared to that I think is a little unfair. I think he’s done an incredible job in the time he’s had, and the performances that the players have put in are not a fair reflection of his leadership.”
For all the mitigation there is little to explain how poorly some experienced players have performed in the tournament so far. “There’s no magic pill that you can swallow overnight to improve performances,” Root said. “But it’s not beyond our reach as a group. We’ve got the talent and we’ve got bags of experience. We just need to put those performances in that we’re more than capable of doing.”
