If Beefy Could Be A Blocker, Your Lot Can, Joe...

If Beefy Could Be A Blocker, Your Lot Can, Joe...

Now that Joe Root has had the chance to digest the criticism aimed at his side’s batting in the fiasco at Trent Bridge by Nasser Hussain and Michael Vaughan, this might be a good time for the new England captain to summon up the spirit of two other famous predecessors, namely Iron Mike and Iron Bottom.

For the record, this is what Vaughan, who has known Root since the young pup first appeared at his Sheffield Collegiate club a decade ago, had to say about England’s second innings in the second Test of the Investec series against South Africa, a capitulation so witless, spineless and soulless that supporters who had turned up on the final day hopeful of a long overdue great escape merely drifted away at its premature ending in stunned silence.

“The England batting has been appalling,” Vaughan told listeners to Test Match Special. “Maybe it’s a lack of respect about what the game is. They look like they are playing a T20 game. They have this approach of attack, attack, and there’s no thought or feeling of seeing off a bowler or wearing a team down.”

Root responded afterwards by insisting: “That’s very unfair. I can’t believe he’s actually said that.”

Believe it, Joe, and believe this, too, from Hussain, on Sky: “There’s a role for someone to value their wicket and say, ‘over my dead body’. If people bowl well acknowledge it, don’t say, ‘we’re trying to play a positive brand of cricket’. A score of 133 all out (in 44.2 overs) is a rubbish brand. They are not showing a steely side.”

Nor are they showing the quality that earned Michael Atherton the nickname by which the best pace bowlers of his generation came to respect him as highly as his teammates, and which Root and his would do well to tap into now.