Joe Root speaks on England’s recent ODI resurgence under Brook while pointing out the “guilt” on letting Buttler down.
Joe Root speaks on how the guilt at not supporting Buttler enough during his captaincy is driving this new England resurgence.
With a career-best 166 not out to chase down a mark of 309 in the second ODI against the West Indies in Cardiff on Sunday, Root became England’s top ODI runscorer and secured a series victory. It comes after he surpassed Sir Alastair Cook’s record of 12,742 in the opening Test of the Pakistan tour last October, propelling him to the top of the English Test rankings.
Root surpassed Eoin Morgan’s previous high of 6,957 when he reached 42. Even though Morgan’s runscoring prowess was spectacular, his leadership was what made his legacy. He led England to the top of the rankings by implementing a white-ball revolution, which culminated in their 2019 50-over World Cup victory.
With 556 runs, Root was England’s leading scorer at the tournament and an essential part of Morgan’s system. However, he found himself playing less and less 50-over cricket as priorities changed, especially in the last years of his own Test captaincy. During Buttler’s tenure, Root played only 25 of 47 ODIs, even without the Test captaincy.
“I played a huge amount of cricket with Jos and almost felt guilty that I wasn’t there for him throughout a lot of his tenure,” Root said.
“And now that there’s more chances and more opportunities to play ODI cricket, I want to be involved in that. I want play as much as I can for England and, if I’m going make the team better, then absolutely want to be there and involved in, in trying to do that.
“Whether that’s helping in and around practice with the younger players as a senior bat, and sharing and expressing my experience with them to try and speed up their processes and their learnings. But also out on the field, I feel like I’ve still got a lot to give and there’s a lot more runs in there. Hopefully knocks like that show that.
“Hopefully, this can be a team that is quite consistent and sticks together for a long period of time and we can start building something as a group together. It’s what we did really well leading up to that 2019 World Cup. I don’t think that counts for nothing.”