The Fab One: How Joe Root Became A Century-Scoring Demon After 2020 | Data Speaks

For some reason, we, the people of sports, love a promotion-relegation battle. 

In the English Premier League last season, pundits on broadcasts and podcasts caught themselves including Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur in the ‘Big Six’. They’d soon sheepishly realize and wonder whether they still belonged in that coveted group, given they finished 15th and 17th in the league table, respectively. 

For almost half a decade before that, as Arsenal slumbered and Leicester City soared, that ‘Out of the Big Six’ tag fell on the Gunners. We do the same in cricket: since New Zealand legend Martin Crowe coined the term ‘Fab-Four’, we have spent as much time looking for one to take out of it as we have spent admiring them individually.

If you go back

to the internet of 2015-2021, that damnation used to fall on Joe Root. Steve Smith was an unmatched maverick in Tests, Virat Kohli couldn’t go through five matches in any format without a match-winning innings, even if he tried to, and Kane Williamson always managed to fall somewhere in the middle.

In February 2021, Sunil Gavaskar said Root was a ‘notch below’ the other members of the Fab-Four. In 2019, ESPNcricinfo did a piece analyzing whether Root had fallen out of the Fab-Four, pointing out how he was the only one with a sub-50 Test average, and pondering whether captaincy or his unsettled team were weighing him down.

In the year between those two instances, Shane Watson ranked Root out of the Fab-Four, putting Pakistan’s Babar Azam at second, after Kohli. 

“It’s incredible how these world-class batters, some of the best batters to play Test cricket, just go through waves where instead of scoring those big hundreds, they get the 70s-80s,” Watson said of Root in a conversation with the ICC. “[They] still have an impact on the game but are not able to really maintain that really high standard of getting those big runs as they have done in the past.”

Simply put, Root didn’t have the currency of cricket’s batting greats as much as the other three: centuries. Big or small doesn’t matter if you cross the three figures and give the audience a rush of blood they can only get when you lift off your helmet, as if taking a show-off breather in the middle of a long war you have been winning.

In January 2021, Kohli had 27 Test centuries (73 Tests), Smith 26 (70 Tests), Williamson 23 (64 Tests), and Root 17 (96 Tests). Worse, Root had 48 half-centuries in the same time, more than Kohli and Smith’s 50s combined. 

He was getting from 0-50 excellently, but something would happen and he’d fall before the more storied half of the century.

Cut back to 2025, and in the last four years (before the ongoing Sydney Test), he has 23 centuries compared to 17 fifties in 63 Tests; Williamson has ten centuries in 24; Smith has ten in 46; and Kohli, the first among them to retire from the format, had only three in 36. 

In 2025, only Root is capable of chasing Sachin Tendulkar’s all-time Test runs record.

What changed with Joe Root?

The short answer is: everything. Root’s rate of converting his half-centuries into tons increased by over 80%, and his average after crossing 50 went up by more than 45%.

The long answer is long, so we’ll take it step-by-step. 

The easy questions first: maybe Root simply played fewer deliveries in the 50-100 run phase after 2020. This could happen if he were batting at a high strike rate and reaching his century quickly, which would have meant less exposure to wicket-taking balls.

But there was only a marginal difference in his post-50 strike rate before and since 2021.

So, it could be that before 2021, Root was playing too many dot balls and spending too much time on one end in the 50-100 phase and thus putting too much pressure upon himself?

There was a slight increase in the average number of dots Root was playing before getting out pre and since 2021. But a data-wide check confirmed that in Test cricket, extra dot balls don’t mean high wicket probability, and most wickets follow only a couple of dots.

Some also blamed Root’s pre-2021 failures on his undecided batting position. Indeed, since 2021, he has batted 88.2% of the time at number four, while he didn’t even have a set position for 50% of his knocks before 2021 and played everywhere between opening and number six. 

So, before 2021, Root would often come to bat around the 22nd over; since then, his ‘entry point’ has come up to around the 17th over. On average, coming out to bat between the 10th and 20th overs usually leads to better returns for batters.

However, pay attention to the third bar in Figure 1 again — Root’s 50-plus score frequency decreased since 2021. He has crossed the milestone fewer times per innings since 2021, despite scoring more centuries and having a better conversion rate.

The better question: Is there any relationship between the entry point and the ability to convert your half-centuries into centuries?

We analyzed the relationship using logistic regression, a statistical technique specifically designed for yes/no outcomes like century conversion. It confirmed that the odds of converting fifties to centuries decrease only over large differences in the entry point. 

In simpler words, if the probability of scoring a century with an entry point of around the 10th over is 7%, the same for entering in the 50th over is 5%. That’s the nature of the sport — the skill level of batters and the time given to them goes down with the order in Tests. 

Root’s entry point didn’t change enough for it to make a difference. Maybe a bit more stability in the positioning could have helped, but we ran a quick regression model on that, too, and there’s no major correlation between deviation of batting position and conversion rate.

So, we move on.

The one thing that we know to certainly make a difference is ‘shot control’. In the ball-by-ball data available publicly, the data-collectors assign simple yes/no values to a batter’s shots: they are either in control of it, or not (like edging, mis-timing, and so on).

Generally, less control over a phase of an innings means a greater likelihood of getting out. Analyzing the entire dataset of Tests tells that each uncontrolled shot has a 9% dismissal risk (more on this soon).

Before 2021, every time Root crossed fifty, his control percentage would drop from around 87.37 to 87.13. Since 2021, it has increased from 86.59 before reaching fifty to 88.09 after it.

The difference becomes clearer if you zoom in a bit. Let’s plot Root’s control percentage for all the available innings where he crossed fifty, along with the wickets fallen after that milestone.

First, let’s look at the lines. The blue one indicates how, pre-2021, his control was regularly lower than his post-2021 (orange) levels, while going through deliveries in an innings.

Then, focus on the bars on the horizontal axis. His dismissal rate (wickets fallen divided by the number of knocks he reached that ball number) plummeted drastically.

It shows that past the score of fifty, Root was in much better control of his shots since 2021 than before, and its impact was clear in terms of reduced wickets.

The control difference might not seem much; admittedly, it’s only around 1.2% absolute improvement. That means only 1.2 fewer uncontrolled shots per 100 shots.

But as we know, each uncontrolled shot has a dismissal risk of 9%. Therefore: 1.2 fewer bad shots × 9% risk = around 11% reduction in dismissal probability every 100 shots.

That’s exactly what happened: pre-2021, Root’s dismissal rate in the 50-100 runs phase was 21.9%, which came down to 9.5%. By reducing only 1.2 bad shots every 100 balls, he more than halved his dismissal rate, which explains the improved conversion.

There’s another layer to it, too. Pre-2021, his control percentage had a standard deviation (calculation of how much Root’s control would deviate from his mean) of 4.1%, which came down to 2.9% in the four years since, for the same 50-100 run phase. 

It tells you that though Root’s overall control only changed marginally, it used to deviate a lot more in his early years. 

Before 2021, he had some ball bins with only 82.54% or 84.85% control on average, which saw dismissal rates of 53.4% and 75%, respectively. Whereas, since 2021, there have hardly been any ball bins with less than 85% control.

If we analyse Root’s overall database — 50s and otherwise — it shows that his control dropped from 86.41% before 2021 to 85.85% after. It’s not surprising, as the same happened with the average top-six batter for England (85.05% to 83.21%).

But here’s the crucial bit: in the 50-100 run phase specifically, the average England top-six batter’s control decreased from 86.9% to 83.9%, which was in contrast to Root. Although it could be down to a decline in quality of the batters around him, it’s not a fluke that Root got better personally and also well above the average top-six batter after crossing the fifty mark.

How did Root improve his control in the 50-100 runs phase?

Let’s go even deeper, step-by-step. We know that Root’s control gain was marginal but had a significant impact, and we also know that he curiously improved between the 50-100 runs phase, going against the trend of the rest of his top-six-batting teammates.

Could it be that he improved his technique against specific bowling types, say, left-arm spinners who coincidentally bowled around the 50-100 runs phase?

As you can see, most of the improvement in Root’s 50-100 runs phase play seems to have come against pace. His dismissal rate didn’t change much against spin since 2021, when, in comparison, it got better by over 75% against the faster bowlers.

Another condition check: for the average top-six England batter, the dismissal rate against pace in the 50-100 run phase also got better, but only by 20%. That shows again that Root was an outlier against pace in this phase. We can now safely narrow it down further. 

Although we can fully tilt into the types — left-arm fast, left-arm fast-medium, left-arm medium-fast, and so on — the sample size of Root’s wickets in the 50-100 run phase since 2021 isn’t large enough to analyze properly.

But there’s one thing of note: before 2021, Root got out to left-arm pacers seven times in the 50-100 run phase, which dropped to zero post 2021. Interestingly, he hardly came across left-arm pacers much since 2021, facing them only eight times compared to 25 before. 

Maybe he was lucky for that, but still, he increased his control against left-arm pacers from 87.96% to a good 90%.

Now, Root’s dismissal rate of 1.81 in the pre-2021 50-100 run phase against pacers is extraordinarily poor for him. Yes, it is significantly more than his dismissal rate in the same phase post-2021, but he has also never gotten out that frequently, even before scoring a fifty, throughout the 13 years of his career for which we have data.

So it’s down to this: Root’s conversion rate difference seems to be rooted (pun definitely intended) in those 24 fewer wickets against fast bowlers after he reached 50.

The specifics 

In July this year, Ricky Ponting asked Root directly about how he managed to collect so many centuries in the last few years. His answer was not entirely revealing but still insightful.

“I actually went away through COVID and I just spoke to Nass (former England captain Nasser Hussain) and the analyst quite a bit. I said, can I get some footage off Sky and just look at modes of dismissal and if there were any trends and see the different ways I was getting out of different points in my innings — first 20 balls, first 30 runs, 50 or to 100, if there were anything that I was doing in it.”

“I think one thing that I’ve done within that is actually try and look at the game slightly differently. For the start of my career, a lot of it was based on my technique, ‘Where my hands are, where my head is, am I lined up? Is my trigger right?’ Whereas in the second phase of things, it’s been more about managing risk and thinking like how can I eliminate as many modes of dismissal as possible with the highest output. And sometimes the conditions are so extreme that the risk obviously has to go up.”

“But ultimately it’s how can I take bowled and LBW out of the game, or how can I get caught in the slips [out of the game] — whatever seems to be the biggest threat — can I eliminate it as much as possible but still give myself scoring opportunities? And sometimes that might be by putting a bit more pressure back on bowlers, or you might have to score more aggressively against the spin on seaming conditions and absorb against the seamers.”

Like with any other batter, most of Root’s wickets against pace in the 50-100 run phase before 2021 (Figure 5) were limited to the six of the 30 zones comprising full to short-of-good lengths and stumps to wide-outside-off lines, which is often referred to as the ‘channel’. 

Since 2021, in the 50-100 run phase, he only got out in four zones, all in the channel, while the dismissal rate dropped to zero in the other 26.

To view Figure 5 in full, click here.

Most of the dismissals, both before and since 2021, were caught-outs, which can be easily represented on wagon-wheels (Figure 6).

Look how red the octant 8 (near the slip region) is for pre-2021 and still how the wickets are spread around a bit, which completely pales since 2021 in the same phase. 

Two octants had the highest dismissal rate in the 50-100 runs phase before 2021: octant 1, which is on the leg-side behind the wicket, and octant 8, the slips, gully and third region. We can isolate them and check the control, attack, and how much running he was doing and how many boundaries he was scoring in those octants.

You’d see two things stand out in Figure 8. Firstly, the dismissal rate went to zero in the 50-100 run phase for Root in octant 1, and he overall improved on it too. 

Secondly, there was a major decrease in the dismissal rate in octant 8 since 2021 to only 4.62% which was unique in comparison to all other phases throughout his career. Both drops in dismissal rate were in concert with a sharp rise in control and attack.

It’s amazing how outlandish this change is. In comparison, the average top-six England batter’s dismissal rate didn’t change at all in either octant 1 (11.44% before 2021 to 10.79%) or octant 8 (12.90% to 12.75%) in the 50-100 run phase. 

In Root and most other batters’ careers, the major deliveries that contributed to octant 8 dismissals belonged to these six channel zones: short-of-good length + outside off-stump; good length + outside off-stump; full length + outside off-stump; short-of-good length + wide outside off-stump; full length + wide outside off-stump; and good length + wide outside off-stump.

For these six zones, Root made a major shift in the 50-100 run phase after 2020. Figure 9 compares his percentage of his most used shots in the 50-100 run phase since 2021 against every other phase (pre and post 2021) of 0-100 runs in his career.

You’d see fewer defending, much less leaving of the balls, and much more steering, pushing, cutting and dabbing — all octant 8 shots. We know he was running more and hitting boundaries at a nearly identical rate: but less defending in the 50-100 run phase was key.

It’s true for simply the comparison of 50-100 run phases before and since 2021, as well.

Why was this beneficial? Figure 10 shows his wickets pre and post-2021. Most came while defending the ball, which has come down immensely since 2021.

All the shots that we categorise as ‘defended’ generally have the least control percentage for obvious reasons. You defend difficult, seaming, swinging deliveries, not ones where you believe you can hit perfectly, thus defense sees more false shots.

On the other hand, shots like dab, steer and push to the third region are high-percentage shots for Root, which come naturally to him. Look at the control percentages of all his shots in the 50-100 run phase: the shots he replaced defended were either easier to control even before 2021 (Figure 11) or he improved on and deployed them better since 2021.

The late Graham Thorpe, one of Root’s idols and former England batting coach, also pointed this out in 2021, when Root had just returned to the top of the ICC men’s Test rankings.

“The sideways position (of Root’s stance) allows the ball to come alongside you,” Thorpe told The Telegraph. “He can play a horizontal cut shot if it is wider, but if it is under him, he can play that back foot punch shot as well. There are risks attached to playing a straight bat punch away from your body, but his hands are so close to his body that it is a low-risk shot for him.”

Either way, his octant 8 control improved and dismissal probability plummeted as he got a touch more aggressive and smart.

Overall, too, the percentage of balls Root has either defended or left alone in the 50-100 run phase has also progressively come down since 2021 (Figure 12). It was at its peak in 2019 at around 52.40%; in the latest year of our data, 2024, it was 19.48.

So, we know in octant 8, his defensive control numbers didn’t change, but wickets came down drastically. What about him getting out on the cut shot six times, flick shot four times, on-drive twice, cover-drive twice, which came down to zero, zero and one, respectively?

Four of those —  flick, on-drive, cover-drive and pull — saw marked improvement from Root in terms of control in the 50-100 run phase against pacers. Control for leg-glance remained almost the same while it took a bit of a hit for the cut shot.

Similar patterns emerged for all of them, especially the front-foot ones.

For the flick (Figure 13), there was a slight change in how since 2021, Root was playing it fewer times on the good length in the middle-stump line and more on the same line but fuller lengths.

In other words, he was picking it better. However, that’s not the full story because Root also simply got better in controlling the shot on the good length and outside-off-stump lines, too.

For on-drives (Figure 14), he simply stopped playing it on the good-length, focusing completely on the full lengths. But even there, his control shot up.

The same happened for cover-drive (Figure 15):

In all three front-foot shots, he has chosen to reduce playing them when the ball pitches in the good-length area, while also increasing his overall control across most lengths. This indicates a technical and a mental change.

This change seems to be the reason behind his reduced LBW and bowled wickets since 2021, too. Yes, it hardly made a difference in the 50-100 run phase, which is why we started our analysis with caught dismissals only; but overall, they came down from 14 to 9.

Former England batter Michael Atherton spoke about it in 2021.

“He has made a slight technical adjustment now, with that back leg going straight back. That made him less vulnerable to the lbw when the ball is straight. For three years, he was not quite at his best at home against seam and pace bowling.”

There has been another change — Root is now batting well outside his crease. In 2024, a BBC report included a brief piece of analysis from Soham Sarkhel of CricViz, a company that collects much more advanced data than what is publicly available.

“During [2017-2022], his average interception point against pacers was 1.79m in front of the stumps,” the report said of Root. “Since the start of 2023 though, this has moved to 2.17m – a difference of almost 40 cm, which has [helped] to take lbw out of the equation as much as possible. Only 11% of his dismissals have been through lbw against pace in this period – almost half of what it was between 2017-2022. Year-on-year, he has stepped out just a little bit more to reach a point where he is now batting furthest from the stumps than he ever has in his Test career.”

Batting so further down the crease helps counter swing and seam movement better. It also means you are meeting good-length and full deliveries much closer to your head, thus giving you better control on the front foot shots.

In the interview mentioned earlier, Thorpe had also noted how his pupil’s front-foot game got better because he was playing ‘under his eyes’.

“His shoulders are much straighter. He is leaving the ball really well, so he knows where his off stump is. His all-round scoring ability is at an exceptional level, which means the margin of error for bowlers is very small,” Thorpe said.

Of course, it took hours and hours of practice. 

Here is Root’s father, Matt, on the Test Match Special in 2022: “During COVID, he got one of the Root Academy ball feeders that we have and he’d be there for an hour batting on one leg for balance. There’s a video somewhere of him doing it.”

Finally, let’s talk about the back-foot shots: pull and cut.

For the former, the change was quite small. Overall, his dismissal frequency didn’t change much but his control% went up from 74% to 80% and he started using the shot much more.

But specifically in the 50-100-run phase, he was only getting out playing the pull shot on the wider lines before 2021. Since then, his control% got much better and wickets plummeted, even when there wasn’t much change in his picking of line and lengths.

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And here’s him playing the same shot against Australia at the Gabba in the recent pink-ball Test where he broke his century drought down under. In this instance, he was batting at 92.

Check the difference between his stances:

Since 2021, he has started standing more open, with a wider gap between his legs, and his trigger is more back-and-across instead of simply back a step. Moreover, in his habit of regularly moving the bat up and down, it now goes much higher and stays almost on the line of his helmet when the bowler takes his stride.

All of it is helping him get on top of the bounce much better. No wonder the pull shot was his most productive at the Gabba, and has been so through many of his hundreds.

It’s just another micro-change, likely polished with hours spent in nets working on reflexes, that has made him a much more complete batter.

Now, we move on to another such improvement — the cut shot. Finding what had changed here was quite tedious: it seemed obvious and impossible at the same time.

Take a look at Figure 17, comparing his cut shot heat map before and since 2021 in the 50-100 run phase against pacers. 

A couple of things that clearly helped was he reduced playing this shot on the good length and also separately, on the line of the stumps.

There was better mental clarity in how it was mostly deployed when the ball was shorter than good length and outside the stumps line. Still, for some reason, though the wickets came down for the short-of-a-good-length area, his control didn’t get better. 

It almost seemed like an anomaly or at least something that was difficult to analyse with the data available publicly. Advanced data, for instance, can have information as complicated as ball trajectory to also as well as as simple yet crucial as the pace of the ball.

However, the public data categorizes fast bowlers as such for both bowling arms: medium, medium-fast, fast-medium, and fast, in the increasing order of their pace. It turns out, his stats were mostly unchanged for three of the four categories.

He was never in trouble against medium and medium-fast bowlers before, while his average returns against express pace remained the same. But there was a significant change against fast-medium bowlers — who bowl around the 135-140kph range.

Figure 18 compares his heat-maps against only those bowlers overall (not just 50-100 run phase). Out of the four wickets before 2021 shown here, three came in the 50-100 run phase, and all were in the short-of-good-length category.

Look at the control% and you’d find a clear improvement in Root’s game while playing the cut shot.

The changes he made technically also seemed to help here. Below is a comparison of him playing the cut shot before (GIF 3)… 

… and after (GIF 4) 2021. 

Getting on top of the bounce looks easier for him now, doesn’t it?

Another notable thing Root has possibly changed is playing this shot with harder hands. Going back to videos of so many cut shots registered in the data showed him slashing quite strongly — sometimes even with his back arched — so edges flew comfortably over slips.

There’s a caveat involved here: the sample size is quite small and we are basically asking how six wickets became zero when those six wickets could just be all lapses in concentration, uncomfortable game situations, or just bad luck.

But the overall improvement in control from Root and its impact is real. 

Tight Yorkshireman

We can’t end this without speaking about mentality. Because data is logical and easy to visualise, we can often see it as the holy grail of all analysis.

However, cricketers are humans and more often than not, there’s a humane push behind their ability to solve a problem.

Root told this to Sky Sports in August 2021: “Jacques Kallis said something when we were out in Sri Lanka, he said ‘the first hundred is for the taxman and the rest is where you actually earn your money’. As a tight Yorkshireman, that hit home with me! So, it’s about making sure you keep earning your coin and you make it count when you get in.”

“The last few years has put things in perspective without fans in the ground,” he added. “There are people around the country who have gone through hard times and you are getting the opportunity to play for England at great grounds. It’s important you savour certain moments. The last two hundreds I’ve savoured that milestone.”

Before the ongoing Ashes, Root appeared on several podcasts that focused mainly on his mentality. Australian television presenter Mark Howie, for example, asked him how being dropped from the team after the 2013-14 tour down under made him a better player.

“I spent too much time trying to be the complete player and I wanted every aspect of my game to be here (points at a high level). And I spent so much of that series working on areas of my game that I thought needed to upskill and neglected all the things that I was good at. And  I never managed to put pressure back on the opposition, get the bowler off his length or use my real strengths to try and wrestle momentum back in my favour. When you’re not practicing the things you’re good at then you get the opportunities in the games and you miss them.”

“And I think going away from that… so it’s like, right, these are things that are going to take two years to get better at. I’ll slowly chip away at them. I won’t neglect them at all, but they’re a project that I think can take ages, but these are my super strengths. These are things that I do really well that’s what I’m going to make sure are always at their peak. And you know, if you miss in those areas, then I’m going to do everything I can to hurt you and make it difficult for you to bowl there… It was like it’s OK and it’s important to keep looking to improve and evolve and tinker. But you have to look after what your bread and butter is and what serves you well time and time again and what’s got you to where you are now.”

In many interviews, he also spoke of the mental toll captaincy took on him, and how he used to feel like a ‘zombie’ when he took the pressures home to his family. 

In a chat on MindflickOfficial with England great Andrew Strauss and performance psychologist Dr. Pete Lindsay, Root again mentioned how he grew up trying to always be technically correct, wanting to perfect his stance and movement in response to any weakness, which wasn’t always the right answer.

In contrast, Brendon McCullum and Ben Stokes’ leadership helped him feel freer than ever — backing their ‘uncomplicated’ philosophy was like a ‘clean slate’ and a ‘new door’ in his 30s.

“I remember having a conversation with Brendan and I said I am really struggling with this bowler who consistently lands the ball in this area and I feel quite vulnerable. And he said, ‘If he lands the ball there every time, that makes it easier, you know where it’s going to be — go and stand somewhere else before he lets it go’”.

“And it’s like, well, that sounds like the most basic and stupid thing that I have not even [considered]. You get so wrapped up in your own mind and the way you see them actually situationally. That is the smart thing to do. You can then still play the same but from a different starting point.”

That’s all it is. Root didn’t become a superhuman during the pandemic, suddenly batting flawlessly to break all the records — he’s still playing the same game. 

But wherever it mattered, he made small, crucial changes and it resulted in fewer wickets, better conversion rate and a lot more hundreds. 

Having scored his first tons in Australia this Ashes, he has all but done everything to show that individually, he’s one of the best. Yes, he has had age on his side, and also the fact that England plays more Tests than some of the smaller nations combined.

But Root is also one of the few to have treated the format right. Tendulkar’s record or not, he’ll always have that.