There's No Skipping The Issue For The Captain...

There must have been times during the Adelaide Test match when Joe Root and Steve Smith must have wished they’d taken up soccer rather than cricket. Captaining a footie team doesn’t put quite as much strain on the old grey matter, and you’re hardly likely to get savaged by the media when the biggest decision you ever have to make is what to reply when the ref says: “heads or tails?”

- Martin Johnson

However, when the coin falls your way as captain of the England cricket team you immediately have to make another decision. And it’s a good bit more complex than whether to take choice of ends or the kick-off. Hence, when Joe Root opted to bowl first in Adelaide, he knew he was risking the opprobrium of an entire nation. Or even worse. A full blown harrumph from the wisest cricketing brain on the planet (just ask him) of Geoffrey Boycott.

Whether or not Root’s inclination was to bat when he walked out to toss, but suffered the same sudden change of mind as Nasser Hussain in Brisbane in 2002, we probably won’t know until Joe writes a book, but it may well have been the same kind of involuntary urge experienced by that Indian umpire who apologised to Mike Brearley for giving him out lbw. “I am sorry, Mr Brearley. I know it was not out, but I felt my finger going up, and I just couldn’t stop it.”

Smith, though, came pretty close himself to facing some unpleasant music. The Australian press might be like an old Pathe News wartime bulletin when it comes to propaganda (one newspaper described Root’s decision to bowl as “cowardly”) but they can turn pretty nasty when they lose, and watching Smith twitch, fret and fidget in the slips when England were initially declining to come quietly was the body language of a man making a mental note to cancel the papers.