On Friday, I was mad at Joe Root. I was also mad for Joe Root.
England's all-time leading run scorer in test cricket will follow the trail blazed by Robert Downey, Jr. in the Avengers movies. He’s reportedly headed back to the captaincy in a few weeks, albeit somewhat reluctantly, to see England through their summer-ending series against Pakistan and could lead the side onto the field in the Ashes next summer as England struggles to chart a course in the wake of Brendon McCullum’s dismissal and Ben Stokes’ abrupt retirement as captain. Now sitting just 1,808 runs away from passing Sachin Tendulkar as the all-time leading scorer in test cricket, he is headed down a familiar, frustrating path.
Joe Root has won more tests than any captain in England’s history; he has also lost more tests than any captain in English history, because he has captained more tests than anyone despite not having an exceptionally long tenure in the role. His run as permanent captain ended in early 2022 for the straightforward reason that he failed to win any of his last eight tests and won just one of his last 17 in charge, including an 0-4 Ashes in Australia and a loss and two draws against the West Indies. After that series in the Caribbean, Root resigned, saying it had "recently . . . hit home how much of a toll it has taken on me and the impact it has had on me away from the game," which is an extremely polite way of saying he was miserable in the role and the team sucked. He finished with a record of 27 wins, 26 losses, and 11 draws.
After Stokes was suspended for the second test against New Zealand back in June, Root stood in as captain and led his brethren head-on into a Matt Henry buzzsaw and a 253 run loss. Not only that, England lost an entire match's worth of World Test Championship points for a slow over rate that put them within reach of the West Indies and Pakistan at the bottom of the table. One might be inclined to claim England doesn't really care about the WTC, and I would agree, since that would necessitate caring about winning. As Liam Livingstone said, caring too much is a sin in the eyes of the ECB.
Livingstone’s conversation with Managing Director Rob Key, in which Key reportedly said he had “100 more important things to do” than speak to Livingstone, is as disqualifying as it is illuminating. Whatever those other things are, Key doesn’t appear to be doing them, either. When the coin is tossed for the first test with Pakistan at Headingley in August, he will have had nearly two months to find a permanent captain and a permanent head coach. He has done neither and has decided, instead of staking out a bold new direction for the test squad, to return the mantle of leadership to the man whose captaincy necessitated Bazball in the first place. He wasn’t ready to bite the bullet on the optics and appoint Harry Brook, and he passed on experimenting with Ben Duckett or Jamie Smith or even Jacob Bethell, which all sound dicey until one remembers Ollie Pope has a winning record captaining a lot of the current personnel in the squad and even won away from England. Key has tried nothing and is all out of ideas.
Truthfully, Root and the English captaincy drama is just a pebble in an avalanche and a convenient framing device for the larger issues at play. There is a global malaise of mis-administration in the highest levels of the sport. Todd Greenberg's most innovative idea for Australian cricket is to play its signature event in India. New Zealand is launching the NZ20 in the winter of 2027-28 because all the other kids have one. Pakistan changes its domestic calendar like the weather without allowing any format to produce results and keeps rotating captaincies among the same handful of players for no apparent reason. Sri Lanka’s leadership can’t even get that far because it fell apart for the second time in less than four years in April. The ECB has exactly one trick to generate revenue - making cricket shorter - and they have now used it twice in this century. I'm waiting with rapt anticipation for the announcement of The Eighty, another bespoke format nobody asked for that will confuse children and middle-order batsmen alike. Coming to a half-full cricket stadium near you in 2031. Rob Key might even get to run it.
The rot doesn’t stop at the individual boards, though. The ICC has reverted to its antiquated, exclusionary qualification structures in both the T20 and ODI World Cups They’re bringing in a global qualifier for the T20 tournament that is almost as large as the World Cup itself, and the Cricket World Cup group stage may feature as few as zero Associate teams after a last-minute format change threatens to leave them all in Namibia, which spent millions of dollars on stadium upgrades in a country where the GDP per capita is less than what I make in a month only to have the rug pulled out from under them. Meanwhile, everyone seems convinced that India’s men thrashing their Pakistani counterparts while being co-opted by nationalists is the best way cricket can make money, so anything done in the service of manufacturing that matchup wherever possible is justified even if it compromises the integrity and long-term growth of the sport in the process. After all this work to make life needlessly complicated for Associate Members, I think Jay Shah would walk back universal T20I status if he thought he could get away with it. If there’s money in it, he probably could.
That’s not to say there are no unironically good and earnest people in cricket, or that no one is working to further the game - just that those people lack sufficient power to affect real change in an administrative culture and structure the game has outgrown over the last decade. Those folks are more or less on their own in trying to work for the game’s future without much help from that structure. Everyone will have to connect with like-minded individuals and celebrate the little successes and support them where they can, like a cricketing mutual aid. There is no cavalry coming for the people on the frontlines of grassroots cricket who are advocating to new people on behalf of a sport whose foremost leaders aren’t clear on what they want those new people for… or if they actually want them at all.
Despite all that growth centered on T20 cricket, it’s still a country club sport in many ways. It’s run by people with either the political connections or personal wealth (or both) to be at the table. Those people will not step aside and will not be pushed aside in favor of people with new ideas because the goal of the ICC going back to Abe Bailey’s elevator pitch of the whole enterprise was to be as exclusive as possible while still being able to compete. They condescend Associate Members, deny equity of opportunity to women under the guise of “commercial viability,” and interpret their own rules in bad faith to keep the walls up, because a smaller game means they have to think less, and there is no greater crime than trying to make the bros think at the country club. It's a sign that you care too much.
I’d settle for them caring at all.