Dazzling Brook can lead a new fab four in Test cricket

There may have been a degree of self-effacement about Joe Root’s remarks, the great England cricket batter never one to trumpet his own world-leading qualities, yet his rhapsodic reference of Harry Brook was said with conviction.

- HARRY LATHAM-COYLE

“Brooky is by far and away the best player in the world at the minute,” Root effused of his fellow Yorkshireman. “He can absorb pressure; he can apply it. He can whack you over your head for six. He can scoop you over his head for six. He can smack spin. He can smack seam.”

The declarations of close colleagues are often best taken with a healthy dollop of salt but the statistical case for Brook’s supremacy is growing ever stronger. The 25-year-old has supplanted his senior middle-order partner for county and country at the top of the Test batting rankings – strong Yorkshire, strong England, as the old adage goes.

The 91-ball ton in Wellington that hauled the tourists’ first innings from the furnace was Brook’s eighth in Test cricket and seventh away from home, as many as AB de Villiers achieved across 14 years in South African whites. With his next century, Brook will draw level with the tallies of Robin Smith, Ted Dexter and Jonathan Trott; barely two years into a still nascent international career, he is already in illustrious company.

And all this at a time when Test batting has rarely been harder. Sterner examinations are to come for Brook, of course. His record is bolstered by his absence from the torturous tour of India for personal reasons, with his overseas exploits coming entirely in Pakistan and New Zealand – nations whose natural topography is not necessarily reflected in their cricket surfaces. His propensity for chasing wide of off stump and desire to take on the short ball will come under scrutiny in Australia, who have both the thoroughbreds and firm going to prove troublesome.