Joe Root brilliance leaves rest of 'Fab Four' trailing in his wake

For six years the “Fab Four” dominated Test-match batting but now Joe Root has left Kane Williamson, Steve Smith and Virat Kohli behind.

There was a period between January 2018 and the start of 2021 when Root was dropping back, with the likes of Cheteshwar Pujara and David Warner eclipsing him.

Conversion was the problem. Root turned only six of 32 half-centuries into hundreds from when he was appointed captain at the beginning of the 2017 summer (scoring 190 in his first innings) to January last year.

Since then he has dominated. He has reached 50 13 times, turning nine of them into hundreds, and two of those centuries into doubles (as well as two scores in the 180s).

Root knew 2021 would define his captaincy and he wanted to make sure he had the largest say in his own destiny. His six hundreds and 1,708 runs in a calendar year, the third-highest in history, was not enough to make up the inadequacies of others, and the absence of a century in Australia is a glaring omission for such a fine batsman when you consider Jonny Bairstow (twice) and Dawid Malan managed it on the last two tours despite having far inferior records.

Marnus Labuschagne is now the highest-ranked batsman according to the International Cricket Council, taking top spot from Root with his hundred in the Adelaide Ashes Test – the first time since 2015 that one of those Fab Four had not been No 1.

Behind Labuschagne are Smith and Williamson, just one point each ahead of Root, but the rankings tell only half the story and will be updated on Wednesday when the England batsman will move back up, possibly to No 1 but more likely to second.

Smith has scored just one hundred since the 2019 Ashes and averaged a modest 30 against England last winter. Williamson has been plagued by tendinitis in his left elbow, missing five Tests in a row, only returning for Lord’s where he scored two and 15, dismissed both times by debutant Matt Potts.

Then there is Kohli. Now ranked No 10 in the world, he has not scored a hundred in any format for India since December 2019. He has stood down from the captaincy to find form but the years of leading India, the pressure to perform he put on himself across three formats and in the Indian Premier League drained even his enthusiasm.

“You just need to keep the perspective right,” he said recently. “You just need to go back to the drawing board and say, ‘I just want to look at the ball and hit it’.”

Smith churned out huge hundreds once he got through the dangerous early part of his innings but recently has mirrored the old Root, struggling to convert. He has scored seven fifties in 15 innings without a century, his scoring rate has slowed as teams have become better at packing the leg side and shutting off his scoring zones, which means he has to bat longer for his runs and tires mentally increasing the chance of making an error. Perhaps Australia’s Covid hibernation dulled the senses too much.

Root has managed to stay consistent while playing so much cricket – he has batted 25 more times than Smith in Tests since January 2021 – coping with bubbles and the disintegration of his captaincy. The weight off his shoulders was apparent on Sunday with the emotion of his 26th hundred showing on his face and later admitting the job had been having a negative effect on his health.

The Fab Four are under threat from younger players. Rishabh Pant scored more runs last year than any other Indian in Test cricket and Babar Azam’s 196 in the fourth innings to save Pakistan’s second Test against Australia in March settled any concerns captaincy might stall his progress.

The problem for England is that the next-ranked batsman is Ben Stokes at 29, and then Jonny Bairstow at 47. Extras would get in ahead of most of the others.