Placing our bets on "Test Cricket's Young Fab Four"

[Black_Warrior]

I really am at odds with how to value Root. Sure, he doesn't seem to go on and make hundreds like the rest, but he scores lots more 50's more reliably. If you had 6 roots in your team you would be pretty hard to beat. Throw in the tail and you'd probably always be ending up near 400 per innings. Root's 50's are usually worth a partnership of 100 unless the other batsmen are failing. Are people just getting upset because you can not cheer him on due to the tradition being it is cheers for 100. Why not cheers for two 50's?

Obviously Smith rules, but how can you split the other three except for cheers factor (which doesn't win games)?

[B]Name   InningsAve   MatchAvg  100s  50s[/B]
Smith  63.55        97.93     23    22
Kohli  53.75        83.61     20    15
Root   52.73        86.81     13    36
Willi' 50.62        82.76     17    26

If you allocate a cheer for 100 as double a cheer for a 50 (seems about right listening to crowds) then we have

Smith    68 cheers
Kohli    55 cheers
Root     62 cheers
Willi'   60 cheers

So help me.... What is the problem with Root? In runs per match and cheers per match, he is second best.

Because batting is a bit more than just a mathematical exercise. Yes people do judge by number of hundreds but a century is valued not just because of the numerical value but what it contributes in the context of a match.

Smith's knocks in this series are a great example. His centuries are brilliant because they came at crucial stages, where the match could have gone either way, where England were a wicket or 2 away from dominating the session. Had he got out for 51 in Brisbane or in Perth, those matches could very well have gone in England's favour. But he occupied the crease, scored runs, and broke England's back by just not getting out. England were kept in the field for entire day and their bowlers were out of juice.


And Root is not going to average 50 by the end of his career unless he fixes his conversion rate. This is because no player has an ever lasting purple patch. You fail more often than not over your total number of innings in your career. Root is going to have poor form, and so will Kohli, Smith and KW. They will have bad seasons like Tendulkar, Lara, Amla, Ponting etc. The reason they still average over 50 by the end of it is because of their hundreds which make up for their failures.

Ponting averaged 58 at his peak, finished with 52.

If this is peak Root, then he just doesn't have enough runs to make up for those quiet patches he will face. Kohli is a great example. He fails a lot more often than all 4 of them. He also has the least number of 50s among and still averages almost 54. That's because of his centuries..and not just centuries, when he gets them, he goes and gets a massive 200. This is one area where he is ahead of even Smith. Those double centuries make up for all his failures and allows him a higher average than Root and KW.

 

[srbhkshk]

Not sure how one would analyse that statistically (maybe look at winning and losing percentages in context of highest individual scores), but I'm almost sure that 1 hundred is better than 2 fifties.

 

[OverratedSanity]

Not sure how one would analyse that statistically (maybe look at winning and losing percentages in context of highest individual scores), but I'm almost sure that 1 hundred is better than 2 fifties.

But is it better to the same extent one fifty is better than 5 10s?

Getting out in single digits probably hurts the team just as much as getting a hundred helps it.

 

[Spark]

The value of an innings is pretty easy to assess precisely IMO: compare the team situation to when he got out to when he got in.

There are a lot of Root 50s which look fine for the average, but the team isn't actually that much better off than when he got in. Because he scores his 50s really fast, and usually is the dominant figure in the partnership, there are a lot of times where he's gotten out and left the side 3/80. 4/120, 5/150 etc which still has the team in trouble.

2nd Test, England tour of India at Visakhapatnam, Nov 17-21 2016 | Match Summary | ESPNCricinfo This is the best example I can think of off-hand, but there are a lot of them. A 50 doesn't do much at all for the side if it leaves you 4/80 in reply to 450 after you put it down long-off's throat.

 

[srbhkshk]

But is it better to the same extent one fifty is better than 5 10s?

Getting out in single digits probably hurts the team just as much as getting a hundred helps it.

fair point, finding it hard to pin-point anything here, maybe that they are the premiere batsman of their teams and they need to do more when they get a 50? But clearly that takes less from Root as a batsman but more from Root as a leader.

 

[Spark]

fair point, finding it hard to pin-point anything here, maybe that they are the premiere batsman of their teams and they need to do more when they get a 50? But clearly that takes less from Root as a batsman but more from Root as a leader.

Yeah, this is really obvious in the Smith comparison too. It's not just the individual innings, it's that having one big innings at the core of the side means everyone else can bat around him. All those 50s then become really useful partnership-building contributions rather than frustrating starts-that-didn't-go-on.

It's so annoying because Root is so insanely talented, and capable of playing innings that probably no one else in the world is really capable of. Like, he's arguably the most talented strokemaker in the world right now. But he just hasn't clicked, or refuses to adapt, to how to properly construct a Test innings in the way Kohli had to learn early in his career. The number of get-out shots he played today in a fairly sedate, cautious innings by his standards was just unsustainable. You always felt he would throw it away somehow at some point.

 

[Victor Ian]

Cheers Spark. I think that has put to bed my nagging doubt about the worth of 50's.

 

[Bijed]

I'm basically holding out hope that if Bayliss goes anytime soon, Root might improve in this regard, as I think his conversion problem more or less emerged around when Bayliss took over - admittedly it wss fine in his first series under Bayliss (2 100's, 2 50's in the 2015 Ashes), but it became a thing on the UAE tour shortly afterwards. I'm probably clutching a straws a bit with this one, though.

 

[Adders]

It's become such a massive monkey on Joe Roots back that the longer it goes on the harder it seems to it's going to be for him to break free from it.

I think Bijed is right that the answer probably lies in the management. Anyone that thinks it's a case of Joe Root not giving a **** is way off the money......look at his reaction yesterday when he went out. You'd have to be a hard hearted **** not to feel for him in some small way......the bloke clearly cares so much.

But the reason I think it's management and not just on the player is look at our feckin scorecards......the whole side bar the odd exception is the same, Root gets 70, 80's whereas the other blokes are getting 20's and 30's because he is better. But the core problem is still there amongst them all. They can keep talking about 50's needing to be 150's to win games but in 5 tests (bar Cook's outing in Melb) the story has been the same throughout.

All that said, it would be wrong to look at these conversion failures amongst all our batsmen without paying credit to the Aussie bowlers. They never let up and keep coming at you for the whole day, it only takes 1 ball when you're not 100% switched on and they'll get you.

 

[TheJediBrah]

I'm a big fan of the cheer system devised a few pages ago

If Root still averages about the same as the others I don't care if he doesn't make as many 100s. It just means he fails less as well.

 

[Kirkut]

WTF? KW ahead of TPC and Root? What's worong with CW? Who are your dealers?

 

[TheJediBrah]

WTF? KW ahead of TPC and Root? What's worong with CW? Who are your dealers?

Poll must have been released right after NZ played one of their 3 Tests a year

 

[_Ed_]

Strange to take exception to KW being second, rather than Kohli #1.

 

[Chrish]

Is that KW's fault that his team doesn't play nearly half the games as the others?

How can one account for that?

 

[Spark]

KW being rated so highly on this forum was always kind of spurious IMO. Aesthetics over output.

 

[_Ed_]

Tbf, the poll opened in mid-2014, and in 2014 and 2015 KW scored 2101 runs @ 75.03 with nine tons. No shortage of output at that stage.

But of course Smith has gone to a different level since then.

 

[Chrish]

He was overrated for the time being especially by Kiwi fans, but the guy really has some potential. Has scored runs everywhere against every opposition.

If he was playing as many tests as the others, I have a feeling he would be 2nd only to Smith right now. So I wouldn’t call it as aesthetics over the output.

 

[CricAddict]

WTF? KW ahead of TPC and Root? What's worong with CW? Who are your dealers?

The poll was done quite a long time back. At a time when TPC was still to get into Bradman mode and with a crabby technique. In hindsight, we have all been wrong.

 

[Howsie]

KW being rated so highly on this forum was always kind of spurious IMO. Aesthetics over output.

Jesus.

Whilst Smith, Kohli and Root go about playing 12-15 tests a year, playing in 4-5 test series Williamson will playing 4 tests a year made up of two, 2 test series.

This fight is over. Williamson has absolutely no chance of keeping up with these guys because NZC have basically decided they don’t wanna play test cricket anymore. This World Test Championship has basically had the opposite effect on New Zealand.

So stop with the trolling aye, no output. FMD. 10 test matches in Australia and Root still doesn’t have a major contribution in the country where batsman make a name for themselves.

 

[Fuller Pilch]

Tests and ODIs are so last millennium. Colin Munro is the best batsman in the world.