Nestled in his crib, a baby Joe Root holds a small cricket bat. Now, 33 years later, that same baby is England’s highest-ever Test run scorer.

You could say he was born to the role. “We’ve got a picture of him a couple of days old, holding his cardboard bat in his little crib,” says his mum Helen. “Before he could even walk he had a bat in his hand, and he’d just whack things.”

Helen had two cricket-mad boys at home – Joe’s brother Billy plays for Glamorgan – and husband Matt, who played for Sheffield Collegiate alongside Michael Vaughan. “I spent a lot of time listening to bats being knocked in,” she says.

For at least the last decade or so it has been clear that Root would one day top England’s run-scoring charts. Certainly Sir Alastair Cook has felt him breathing down his neck since retiring from international cricket in 2018, knowing his record would one day be broken by a player who made his Test debut on Cook’s first tour as England captain in India 12 years ago.

But what about those who knew the young Joe? The coaches, his parents and friends from Sheffield who played such a big part in his ascent of the sport. Root is not the kind to forget. He has been brought up to remember those who helped him and to stay humble. Root is the same now as he was when he was a young cricketer.

Root age 12: ‘I want you to challenge me’

He was never precocious like some talented youngsters. He just had a thirst for knowledge, hard work and strived for perfection. Again, not much has changed.

“The first time I met Joe was when his dad, Matt, brought him to Headingley,” says Kevin Sharp, the former Yorkshire batting coach. “They arrived early and watched from the balcony in the indoor school while I had a net with Anthony McGrath, then a first-team player. Matt left me with Joe and we just started to talk. And it was like talking to an adult. I’d never experienced anything quite like it. He’s 12 years old, but he could have been 25.

“The way he understood his strengths, his weaknesses, what he wanted to work on, what he wanted to get better at and I can remember thinking at the time that, ‘Well, if you can bat as well as you can talk, you’re going to be pretty good.’ So anyway, after 20 minutes or so, I said, ‘Right, we’ve got half an hour. Do you want to do some work in the nets together?’ He said, ‘Yes, please’. So I said, ‘What do you want to do?’ And he said, ‘I want you to challenge me. I want the same session Anthony McGrath just had?’ And I said, ‘Well, I can’t do that. I’ll hurt you’. And he looked at me, and he’s only a tiny little lad, very angelic looking, and he just smiled. He said, ‘No, I’ll be all right.’

“I said, ‘OK then, go put all your protective equipment on.’ He came waddling into the hall, you know, like kids at that age do with pads that always seem too big for them. He’d got my beans going because I’d not experienced anything like this from a lad at his age.

“I just said, ‘Right, you’ve asked for this. I’m not gonna be your friend for 20 minutes. Do you understand that?’ And he nodded, and he smiled and I ran in, and threw them hard but he defended it beautifully. He left it, he defended it. And the one thing that I look for in a batter is, can they judge lengths? Do they know when to get back and forward? And he certainly did.

“And then this little voice in my head said ‘Bounce him’. And I thought, ‘Well, I can’t do that. If I hit him on the head, I’ll get sacked.’ Anyway, I did. I bounced him, and he just rocked back, it just clipped his grille on the way through, and I followed through, I was glaring at him, like you would in a match. And he just nodded and smiled. He said, ‘That were a good ball, weren’t it?’ That was it. I just knew. After that session I went upstairs and I chatted to the academy director Ian Dews, and I just said to him, ‘I’ve just had this little fellow Joe Root in. I’ll make a statement now: he’ll open the batting for Yorkshire one day.’ And, of course, the rest is history.”

‘If anyone would throw a ball at Joe, he would bat’

By the time Sharp had his first sight of Root, he had already spent hours in the nets at Abbeydale, Sheffield Collegiate’s home ground, his love of batting – that remains as strong today as it did then – shining through. “We’d find them a little space, give them [Joe and Billy] a bat and a ball and they’d keep themselves entertained for hours. School holidays, they started in the back garden, I lost count of the times I had to fetch balls from the farmer’s field,” says Matt. “When they were a little bit older they’d go down to Abbeydale and play all day. I’d pick them up on my way home from work.

“I only used to bowl underarm to them, which I think helped. You see kids getting thrown balls around their ears, which means they are either ducking out the way or hooking everything. Whether we were in the lounge with a bat and a ping-pong ball, or outside, I’d bowl underarm, one bounce, or little trickle, and let them hit it back. That helped them get into cricket balls in the right way from an early age.

“Joe just loved batting. Men’s nets Tuesday and Thursday nights, the kids would come down and just field balls for us. We’d be in the bar afterwards, probably on our second pint, and it was dark outside, but if anyone would throw a ball at Joe he would bat. He’s still like that now. He just really enjoys batting and you can’t really stop him.”

Even back then, Root was a technician, a student of the game. “As a kid he would never be stroppy when he got out, he was cross with himself. So he’d go straight from the middle to the nets,” says Helen.

Grandad Don would be in charge of filming the young Root batting. “Joe would make us video him,” says Matt. “My father would video it, and he’d stop when it was a dead ball and start again when the bowler was running up. Kevin Sharp thought we were pushy parents, making us video him. He didn’t realise that it was Joe who wanted the footage, not us, so he could watch his own game back!”

Root confirmed the story himself a few years ago. “We would watch it back after the game and when I got out I could hear Grandad on the video saying, ‘Oh, come on Joseph’. So even at the age of 11 I was video-analysing games without realising it.”

‘But you didn’t get me out, did you’

Sharp says the Root you see now is the same Root he saw batting at the crease 20 years ago. His game has changed very little. There were hiccups. A growth spurt at 16 caused him to lose his balance and he struggled to hit over the top. “He suddenly started to grow and his legs got very long and his balance was all over the place,” says Sharp.

“So we went through a hell of a journey together in trying to sort his stance out and his balance and his alignment, his stability. He had about 15-20 innings on the trot where he was out leg before. And then one day, we were at Headingley, and he got out leg before for a scratchy 15 or 20 runs, and he was sat with his pads on for ages, just staring at the floor. And I walked past him a couple of times. I didn’t say anything.

“And then after about half an hour, he’s still staring at the floor, and I said to him, ‘Are you okay, mate?’ He said, ‘Well, yeah, I’m okay but it was really weird today.’ I said, ‘What?’ He says, ‘Well, when I was batting I could feel myself growing.’ And I’m like, ‘Oh, really?’ What do you say to that? And I think I said something to the effect of, ‘Well, that’s awareness for you.’”

As a boy he played in the hard world of Yorkshire league cricket with men, taking balls on the body and getting the odd harsh word. Sharp again. “On a pre-season tour to Barbados he wanted to face fast bowling. ‘All you have to do is run in as fast as you can and hit me on the head.’ And I’ve never seen anything like it. I mean, for 20 minutes I ran in, I hit him on the badge, hit him in the grille, hit him in the chest, and I would run through every ball. And he kept smiling at me and blowing me kisses and winking at me. I just kept a deadpan face.

“And we did it for 20 minutes. It was brilliant. And, you know, after 20 minutes, I said, ‘Right? I’ve done what you asked. I’ve hit you on the head three times.’ He said ‘Yeah, you did but you didn’t get me out, did you?’ When he defended, it hit his gloves. It always went down because he was playing it so softly. So the skill element was absolutely phenomenal. Those sorts of things tell you that this boy’s got something special.”

‘I thought I can’t work any harder’

In an interview with Michael Vaughan for this paper in 2015, Root pointed out two pivotal incidents. “One day I was batting at 11 and the ball nipped back off a dodgy pitch and smacked me in the ribs,” said Root. “I went down. Everyone ran up to me concerned but I got up and when I got down the other end the umpire said if they had appealed he would have had to give me out lbw because I was that small. But when I came off the lads said that if I had retired hurt they would have abused me but because I stayed out there I had earned their respect.”

He also revealed that a chat in a curry house on West Street in Sheffield changed his mindset aged 15. “We had an overseas player called Nadeem Khan and he owned a restaurant. He had played a few games for Pakistan and I’d just had a couple of good games for the first team [Sheffield Collegiate] and Yorkshire academy but Nads told me I was not working hard enough to play Test cricket. I thought he had to be joking. He said I had the game and a solid technique but needed to keep working harder. I thought I can’t work any harder. But for the rest of that summer I gave cricket everything I had and by the end of that season he was right.”

Perfectionism is natural, it is not learned. “He’s a harsh critic of himself. I remember a Yorkshire under-14 tour, down to the south coast,” says Matt. “Played Kent, then the following day they played Sussex. We were late getting down. He was out second ball of the match, and as soon as we arrived [in Sussex] he made me bowl at him for three hours.”

Sharp saw the same work ethic, particularly when Root struggled for power to go with his timing. “He said to me, ‘I’ll never hit one over the top.’ I said, ‘You will, I promise you, all you’ve got to do is practise it, and then the strength will come and you will hit it over the top.’ And of course he’s pretty good at that now, and so it was a journey. I actually think that’s probably been good for him, because it didn’t all go to plan through those couple of years of growth spurts, but he learned to become resilient. It wasn’t like a leap. It wasn’t like, suddenly, everything’s gone right. And I actually think that sometimes with young players, if they’ve risen to the top without any setbacks, it’s more difficult when the setbacks do come, you don’t have the resilience to be able to deal with it.”

‘Tell me what I need to hear’

When you speak to Root’s coaches, from boyhood to top international cricketer, they all say the same thing. He never wants to stop learning, a bit like a top tennis or golf pro. “One of my overriding memories of Joe in my time at Yorkshire is he was always seeking feedback from his team-mates or coaches,” says Jason Gillespie, who spent five years as Yorkshire’s director of cricket. “It was a good coaching lesson for me as well when he said, ‘Coach, don’t just tell me what you think I want to hear. Tell me what you think I need to hear. I can take it.’ It was just very matter-of-fact, a very mature comment for a young kid in the first couple of years of his career.

“He’s very specific with how he goes about his work. He likes to hit a lot of balls, but he practises with a lot of purpose, that it’s not just going into the nets and just hitting for the sake of hitting. He’ll go in there and he’ll be working on something really specific, whether it will be holding the bat a certain way, whether it’s his pre-ball movements, it’s looking to hit the ball in certain areas. And I think that mindset and attitude has allowed him to turn into the wonderful player that he has been.”

Sharp stays in touch with Root, not for coaching tips any more, but just to check in every now and then as an old mate. “I playfully said to him one day, ‘You won’t forget me when you’re playing for England, will you?’ ‘Oh no,’ he says, ‘I’ll never forget you.’ So I asked him to leave me two tickets on the gate at Lord’s with hospitality. Years later, of course, he got picked for England, and I’d just left Yorkshire, and I got a message from him to say that he was in the England team and was I coming to Lord’s to fulfil our deal?

“And I turned him down. I turned him down four times in a row because I just couldn’t make it. When little Alfie was born, his son, I sent him a message, and he sent me a picture back of Alfie, a week old with a little miniature bat. And the last line said, ‘Are you coming to Lord’s this year?’ Yeah, the time had come. It was England against South Africa, 2017 at Lord’s. Alastair Cook retired from captaincy and Joe was made captain, and his first day as captain was at Lord’s. I sat with the family all day, watched him make 180 and got very pissed. Actually, I must have had about 10 pints. Just watching him captain England for the first time was a bit special, it was like it was meant to be.

“And the thing is, they don’t forget. You know, that’s a mark of the man, isn’t it?”