His sparring second ball at a full and wide delivery from Starc had the hallmarks of a man who wanted the comforting feel of bat on ball even if he has trained for thousands of hours to suppress such urges.<\/p>\n
Root\u2019s heart rate would have soared the next over when he came perilously close to losing his wicket in the cruellest way imaginable \u2013 a run out at the non-striker\u2019s end from a deflection off the bowler\u2019s hand.<\/p>\n
He was spared by having the bat in the hand closest to the stumps, saving him precious hundredths of seconds to ground his bat in time.<\/p>\n
The delivery that removed Root came somewhat out of the blue. As well as Starc bowled on one of the biggest days of his career, the set-up to his biggest wicket was non-existent.<\/p>\n
Loading<\/p>\n
Just one of the previous four deliveries required Root to play, the others so short and wide that even the judgement of a tailender would not have been tested.<\/p>\n
Among the trash, Starc found treasure with a delivery that moved away after pitching, leaving Root in a tangle \u2013 all squared up and squirting an edge to third slip, about 180 degrees from where he had intended to play the ball.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"His sparring second ball at a full and wide delivery from Starc had the hallmarks of a man…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":299850,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[564],"tags":[64,63,740,85],"class_list":["post-299849","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cricket","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-cricket","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299849","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=299849"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299849\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/299850"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=299849"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=299849"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=299849"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}