In the history of cricket, Joe Root became the 14th player and the second England player to score 10,000 runs in Test cricket. He achieved the incredible feat on the fourth day of the first Test against New Zealand at Lords’s.
Root nudged the ball off Tim Southee to deep square to complete a brace and achieve a double milestone – his 26th Test hundred and 10,000 Test runs. It was his first hundred in fourth innings of a Test.
Joe Root also became the second Englishman after Alastair Cook to score 10,000 Test runs and is not too far away from eclipsing him as England’s highest run-getter in Tests. Interestingly, both Root and Cook were of the exact same age when they got to the landmark – 31 years and 157 days.
Root became the 14th member of the 10k runs club and the first since 2017 – Younis Khan was the last player to breach the barrier during the Test series against West Indies.
India legend Sunil Gavaskar in 1987 was the first player to get to the mark and since then Allan Border, Steve Waugh, Brian Lara, Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, Ricky Ponting, Jacques Kallis, Mahela Jayawardena, Shivnarine Chanderpaul, Kumar Sangakkara, Alastair Cook, Yonis Khan and now Joe Root have reached the milestone.
Having made his debut in December 2012, Root has become a mainstay of the England team. In 117 Tests before the start of the game, Root scored 9889 runs at an average of 49.19 with 25 centuries to his name.
Of late, the 31-year-old has been in sensational form and has often been England’s lone warrior in their dismal run in Tests in the last two years. He is leading the charts for the most runs in the current edition of the ICC World Test Championship with 1301 runs.
2021, in particular, was a splendid year for Root. He finished the year with 1708 Test runs in 15 matches at an average of 61.00. It was the third-highest runs aggregated in a calendar year by any player in Test history. He capped off an incredible 2021 with the ICC Men’s Test Player of the Year Award.
Having stepped down as Test captain, Root can now fully focus on his batting and breaking several more records in the coming years.
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