Why Joe Root opted to bat left-handed

Joe Root had clocked up more than 10,500 Test runs when he decided, in the spirit of adventure that this England team live by, to try something new: batting left-handed.

Root has an array of sweeps and reverse sweeps, and has at times flipped his stance to switch-hit bowlers after they have released the ball. But he has never set up this way with the bowler at the top of his mark.

With England charging towards a declaration in their second innings on a flat pitch in Rawalpindi, Pakistan were trying to dry up runs. This saw legspinner Zahid Mahmood bowl round the wicket to two right-handers, aiming for the little patch rough that had formed outside their leg stump. For Root and his partner Harry Brook, this meant one thing: sweep, either side of the wicket.

Knowing that the reverse was his banker stroke, Root took things one step further, and simply set up as a left-hander. He opted for the sweep in that stance, too, getting a strike with a hint of top edge to midwicket (which had previously been cover), where Naseem Shah could not quite cling on to a chance.

After that Root reverted to his standard stance, but continued to look for the reverse sweep. Eventually, Mahmood dismissed him for 73, reaching for a conventional sweep to a ball way outside leg-stump.

Is this unique?

Sort of. Players have very occasionally swapped stance before, but in a Test match? Perhaps not.

The normally left-handed David Warner swatted Chris Gayle for 14 runs off three balls in the Bangladesh Premier League in 2019 batting right-handed, as he does in golf. In first-class cricket, the great Sunil Gavaskar batted left-handed during a Ranji Trophy semi-final between Bonbay and Karnataka in 1982. Gavaskar later said this was a deliberate tactic to counter left-arm spinners Raghuram Bhat and Vijayakrishna.

In the England setup, Jos Buttler has taken to warming up left-handed, perhaps with plans to try it in a T20.

Is this just Bazball? Or the future?

England are certainly unafraid to try new things, as shown by Root’s reverse-ramp off the seamers – he used one of these on day four, too – and this was another example of experimentation.

Expect to see this more as time goes by, though, especially in T20 cricket. Batters like Glenn Maxwell are as comfortable switch-hitting as they are in their standard stance, and this is a natural development of that.

A remarkable number of cricketers bowl left-handed but throw right-handed – Jack Leach is an example in this England team – but bowlers capable of both arms are emerging too. Sri Lanka’s Kamindu Mendis has bowled orthodox right- and left-arm spin in the same over in recent years. Such bowlers are more common in Asia, but Australian Jemma Barsby has done that in the WBBL, too.

What did they say?

Paul Collingwood scored a double hundred in an Ashes Test but felt moved to admit that Joe Root looked better than him when swapping from right to left handed.

“He does – sometimes – [do it in the nets] but he looks better left-handed than I did as a right-hander,” said Collingwood. “He has some skill to bat left-handed in a Test. We're finding ways to go against convention. If he feels a leg-spinner bowling into the rough, he can go left-handed, then he goes for it.”