The numbers lined up too neatly to be ignored. Joe Root walked out at Headingley on Thursday afternoon wearing the England shirt numbered 66, in his 66th Test as England captain, and made 66. For a while it looked as though the symmetry would break in the most satisfying way possible — with Test century number 42 on his home ground, in the second match of his second spell in charge. Instead Root was gone, England were another unconverted fifty down, and cricket’s statisticians had a rather different milestone to file: a Joe Root Tendulkar record, of sorts, and not the sort anybody frames.
It is not one of the flattering ones. By perishing on 66, Root drew level with Sachin Tendulkar on 68 Test scores between 50 and 99, as ESPNcricinfo noted — the all-time mark for innings that got most of the way there and no further. It is the sort of record that arrives without a guard of honour.
What The Joe Root Tendulkar Record Actually Measures
Read it coldly and it is a monument to volume. Nobody accumulates 68 scores in the fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties and nineties without first being good enough to reach fifty several hundred times, and until Thursday only Tendulkar had ever got that far. He stood alone at the top of the list for well over a decade. Root, at 35 and back in the captaincy, has caught him with the better part of an Ashes cycle still in front of him.
There is a neat perversity in it, too. A hundred on Thursday would have left the record where it was; the only way Root now claims it outright is by falling short again. That is the tell. This is not a mark to chase but a by-product of a career long enough and consistent enough to produce near-misses in industrial quantities — a career that has already delivered 41 Test hundreds, with the 42nd still pending.
Four Fifties, No Hundreds, One Very Happy Pakistani
Root’s 66 was one of four unconverted half-centuries on a rain-delayed second day in Leeds. Harry Brook top-scored with 91 from 93 balls, missing a home-ground hundred for the second Headingley Test running after his 99 against India last summer. Jordan Cox made 73, Dan Lawrence 51, and England closed on 366 for eight, a lead of 195, according to the Guardian’s match report.
The beneficiary was Ali Usman, whose 5 for 92 was a maiden Test five-wicket haul and, remarkably, the first by a visiting spinner in England since Ashley Mallett in the 1972 Ashes. Root and Cox fell in quick succession with England out of reviews after two poor calls, a sequence picked over by BBC Sport. England resumed on the third morning and had reached 392 for nine when Jamie Smith holed out for 25, the Guardian’s live coverage reported — a total built almost entirely without anyone going on with it.
A Captain With Other Things To Weigh
Root has bigger files open than his own scorecard. This is the first Test series of his reinstatement as captain, with Ben Stokes retired from international cricket, Marcus Trescothick in interim charge of the red-ball side and Stephen Fleming reported as the incoming permanent Test head coach. Brendon McCullum, removed from the Test job in July, remains England’s white-ball coach. Brook, Root’s vice-captain in this format and England’s white-ball captain, spent Thursday demonstrating exactly the patience the selectors said he still had to learn.
Set against all that, a statistical curiosity about unconverted fifties is small change. But it is a useful reminder of what England have in the man leading them into a second tenure. Root has now been reaching fifty in Test cricket for so long, and so often, that his failures have their own world record. On the evidence of Brook’s 91 and everything around it, England will settle for that.
