Post the recently held Anderson-Tendulkar Trophy, England batsman Joe Root became the second highest run-getter in Test cricket history reaching the tally of 13,543 runs in 158 Test matches. The 34-year-old England batsman, who had crossed Jaques Kallis’s tally of 13,289 runs and Rahul Dravid’s tally of 13,288 runs, surpassed Ricky Ponting’s tally of 13,378 during his knock of 150 runs in the fourth Test of the Anderson-Tendulkar Trophy and is now 2,378 runs behind Sachin Tendulkar’s world record tally of 15,921 runs. Root, who had made his Test debut against India in Nagpur in 2012, has scored 30 Test hundreds. Tendulkar, who holds the world record of 51 Test centuries, has now shared how he knew during Root’s debut Test that the England batsman ‘would be a big player’.
“To have gone past 13000 runs is a remarkable achievement, and he’s still going strong. When I saw him for the first time in Nagpur in 2012 during his debut Test, I told my teammates that they were watching the future captain of England. What impressed me most was the way he was able to assess the wicket and how he rotated the strike. I knew at that very moment that he would be a big player.” Tendulkar wrote during an Ask Me Anything session on Reddit.
Aroot, who is the first fastest to 13,000 runs in Test cricket, also holds the record of captaining England in most number of Test matches with his record of captaining England 64 times. The 34-year-old also holds the world record for hitting a fifty in 12 consecutive Test matches. With a total of 13,543 runs, Root is also the highest run-scorer in Tests among Fab Four, the quartet of him, Steve Smith (10,477, Kane Williamson (9, 276) and Virat Kohli (9,230). During his Test career, Root has only played against Tendulkar once and it came during his debut Test against India at Nagpur in 2012. When asked about him going for Tendulkar’s record after surpassing Ponting’s tally of 13,378 runs during the fourth Test at Manchester, Root had shared about his memory of watching Tendulkar play. “It’s not something that I will focus on. Those sorts of things should look after themselves. The focus has to be about winning games. He (Sachin Tendulkar) made his Test debut before I was born. To be playing on the same ground as him and to get the chance to play against him was incredibly cool. (He was) someone you grew up watching, admiring, trying to learn from… To get to play in a series where he was still playing was really quite a memorable experience that I’ll never forget.” Root had told the BBC earlier.
The 34-year-old has so far scored a total of 39 Test hundreds and has scored 13 of his Test hundreds against India and six against West Indies, Sri Lanka and New Zealand each. The England batsman had earlier also talked about how he saw all the Test stalwarts’ tally of runs in his career. “When you look at the names there on that list, they are all people that, as a kid growing up, that’s who I would try to be in the garden, on the street, on the driveway, at my local club. One day I’d try to be Ricky Ponting, the next I’d try to be Kumar Sangakkara or Brian Lara. “I’d pretend that I was in different parts of the world, scoring Test-match hundreds. Even just to be mentioned in the same sentence as these guys is a bit of a pinch-yourself moment. It is pretty cool, yeah,” Root had told Sky Sports.
