'Everything changed'

“I had two weeks at home and sat down with you and asked your opinion on how I get back in the team. I spoke to Kevin Sharpe [Yorkshire coach] who has known my game since I was 12 and sat down with my Dad as well who was brutally honest with me. Kevin is a classic Yorkshireman and told me as it is. He said stick to your strengths. Hone those and do what you know. As you go on gradually develop the rest of it. “In my first Test back against Sri Lanka at Lord’s I sat there waiting to bat and all I could think about was reliving Cooky telling me I was not playing in Sydney. I was using it as an inner motivation. I did not want that happening again. I was thinking back to being that empty vessel in Sydney. Then I walked out to bat, down the stairs and through the Long Room and got a huge cheer and everything changed. As that innings progressed I thought ‘I can’t stop. I have to keep going.’ I ended up getting 200. After that I thought ‘right that is the motivation. Use it.’ The thing is I’ve stopped thinking about it now. Maybe I should go back to it. It might help me get past 80.” This is the 24 year-old Joe Root talking; the man with 3,000 Test runs to his name. But what I am interested in is what gives him that inner belief? How was a cricketing star made and shaped by his upbringing? I have known Joe for years. He was a little kid when I first met him at our cricket club in Sheffield where I played with his dad Matt.

A young Root winning the best batsman award at the English Schools festival. Philip Brown

A lot of people at the club thought his brother, Billy, was the more talented but I saw in young Joe a bit of steel. He would sit by the boundary playing cricket or come in the dressing room and ask to use your bat. He just wanted to play.

His Grandad Don and his mates used to watch me play cricket. There were four of them but they were known as the Castlefield Six because, being Yorkshiremen, the beer was too expensive at the cricket club so they would go up to the shop and buy a six pack of beers. They would sit there and watch us play and were always ready with a word if you had a bad day but loved their cricket. So I go back a long way with Joe and the Root family but there is so much even I don’t know about him. “I’ve seen pictures of me fresh out of the womb with Dad putting a plastic bat in my hand,” he says. “I was two hours old with a cricket bat in my Moses basket. They were never forceful but growing up I could see how they loved the game. Grandad would take me everywhere to matches, especially in the week because Mum and Dad were working. Grandad would bring the video camera and record my innings. We would watch it back after the game and when I got out I could hear Grandad on the video saying ‘Oh come on Joseph’. So even at the age of 11 I was video analysing games without realising it.”

"I walked out to bat, got a huge cheer and everything changed."

Ours is a sport dominated by players who grew up in a cricketing family. It is such an advantage. For Joe it gave him the chance to play cricket with men at an early age in the South Yorkshire league. His Dad dropped down to the fourth team to play with him. They once shared a stand of 180 and Joe scored “probably about 10”. “I was only allowed to bat at 11 and field for 20 overs and not bowl,” he tells me. “Unlike the men I would not have to pay a match fee in fact I would get pop and a packet of crisps at the end of the game for playing. I had to do 20 overs scoring, which I hated, and a few times I had to umpire at square leg. I once gave someone on our team run out and he gave me an absolute serve as he walked off. I did not know what to do. He thought I had given him out so I could get out of umpiring and go out and bat. I was only a kid!

Root celebrates taking a wicket against the West Indies earlier this year. AFP