Root’s position as one of the all-time greats is hardly news to the cricketing public.<\/p>\n
Yet perhaps an underappreciated aspect of his game is his talent in handling spin and the sub-continental pitches that assist slower bowlers.<\/p>\n
While England have often floundered on tours of Asia, Root has frequently flowered.<\/p>\n
He now sits third on the list of non-Asian ODI run-scorers against spin in Asia with 1,118 at an average of 69.87, behind only Jacques Kallis (1,151) and Ricky Ponting (1,330).<\/p>\n
“Joe’s playing of spin is absolutely fantastic because he’s able to manoeuvre the ball,” former England batter Dawid Malan told BBC Sport.<\/p>\n
“It’s different challenges, batting in the sub-continent. Wickets vary from ground to ground.<\/p>\n
“The last wicket they played on, it turned square, it was incredibly slow. And today, it didn’t turn as much and was a better wicket to play on.<\/p>\n
“You have to adapt game by game. Joe’s found ways to do that, to take over and score at a run a ball consistently. He’s done that in all the conditions he’s played in.”<\/p>\n
Unsurprisingly, it’s not just in Asia that Root has prospered against spin.<\/p>\n
Of all the players to score more than 3,000 ODI runs against slow bowling alone, the 35-year-old currently averages 73.43 – only India great MS Dhoni has a better average.<\/p>\n
Indeed, Root has averaged more than 80 against spin in eight calendar years of his ODI career, emerging with a figure of 202.5 in 2017, 101.25 in 2018 and 206 from his first three matches this year.<\/p>\n
Those runs have been built steadily, with a distinct lack of risk – of the players in the 3,000-run club against spin, only Virat Kohli in the last 20 years betters Root’s false shot record of 9.2%.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Root’s position as one of the all-time greats is hardly news to the cricketing public. Yet perhaps an…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":393966,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[1721,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-393965","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cricket","tag-cricket","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393965","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=393965"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393965\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/393966"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=393965"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=393965"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=393965"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}