Joe Root has passed Sir Alastair Cook as England’s leading Test run scorer. But does he rank as England’s greatest of all time? Telegraph Sport ranks the top 10.

10. Sir Geoffrey Boycott

Tests played: 108
Runs scored: 8,114
Hundreds: 22
Highest score: 246*
Average: 47.72

He squeezes ahead of Dennis Amiss, Ken Barrington (none of his five Ashes hundreds led to victory), Colin Cowdrey (average against Australia 37), Ted Dexter, John Edrich and the late Graham Thorpe. Nobody’s defence has been more impregnable – not only against Australia but against West Indies at the start of their reign as world Test champions. The scoring strokes – the cover-drive, the on-drive and when he went up on his toes to force through the covers – were perfection too, when he played them.

9. David Gower

Tests played: 117
Runs scored: 8,231
Hundreds: 18
Highest score: 215
Average: 44.25

He comes second to Sir Jack Hobbs alone for the most Ashes centuries, nine, even if he was never renowned for over-my-dead-body application. Of the 10 batsmen in this list he was as stylish as any. In his time right-arm pace bowlers angled the ball across left-handers from over the wicket (not round, as usual now), so that he was given the width to play those cuts and back-foot drives which delighted his supporters. Brilliant against the wrist-spin of Abdul Qadir in Pakistan in 1983-4, when he was the best in the world of his kind.

8. Sir Leonard Hutton

Tests played: 79
Runs scored: 6,971
Hundreds: 19
Highest score: 364
Average: 56.67

He was England’s answer to Sir Don Bradman – and beat Bradman’s highest innings of 334 when raising the record to 364 – until he broke his left arm during the Second World War. Even so, no England player has reached a higher mark in the ICC Test rankings for batsmen than Hutton.

He was the backbone of England’s batting after the war and – if style is a factor in being the best – he was Root-like in caressing cover-drives and never playing an ugly shot. Had to cope with the additional strain of being the first professional to captain England in the 20th century.

7. Graham Gooch

Tests played: 118
Runs scored: 8,900 
Hundreds: 20
Highest score: 333
Average: 42.58

Ashes cricket should not be the only yardstick. Anyone who could dominate the West Indian fast bowling in the 1980s has to be the highest class against high pace – and Gooch was the only Englishman who did. The zenith was his 154* at Headingley in 1991, arguably the finest Test innings for England until that point – and until Ben Stokes’s 135* on the same ground in 2019. Against medium-pace swing that exposed his heavy footwork, it was a different ball-game; and against Australia (Terry Alderman and Dennis Lillee his nemesis) he averaged only 33.

6. Herbert Sutcliffe

Tests played: 54
Runs scored: 4,555
Hundreds: 16
Highest score: 194
Average: 60.73

It was the highest-scoring era when he played, from 1924 to 1935. Batsmen could not be LBW to any ball pitching outside off stump as well as leg stump, and fast bowlers were few, but it was still some feat to average 66 against Australia. We can picture a right-handed earlier version of Cook: dark-haired, imperturbable, slow-burn, defiant and no wide range of strokes but still a top-class hooker.

Nobody else has scored three hundreds in a losing Ashes series as he did in 1924-25, and two of the all-time innings on wet pitches, at the Oval and Melbourne, were his; but, somehow, being less fluent, nobody suggested he was the equal of Hobbs.

5. Wally Hammond

Tests played: 85
Runs scored: 7,249
Hundreds: 22
Highest score: 336*
Average: 58.45

He made seven Test hundreds in Australia, second only to Hobbs, and his 905 runs in the 1928-9 series is a record to this day. The handsomeness of his stroke play, especially his driving through the covers off front and back foot, has, debatably, not been excelled by right-handers. But when Hobbs and Sutcliffe ceased to pave the way, he struggled.

In 1934 he averaged 20: “my back was bothersome, my throat was troublesome…and I felt the responsibility rested largely on me.” Don Bradman fazed him, and he was tied down when Australia attacked his leg stump. Still, he made a couple more majestic Ashes double-hundreds.

4. Sir Alastair Cook

Tests played: 161
Runs scored: 12,472 
Hundreds: 33
Highest score: 294
Average: 45.35

Opening was not remotely so tough in Hobbs’s time, because fast bowlers abroad were few, if they existed. Cook spent his entire career at risk of being hit yet found the courage, and stubbornness, to face them all down without even an arm-guard. It helped that he held his hands much higher than most England openers.

Aesthetically, of course, he was found wanting, given his limited range of strokes, and he never made an Ashes century in England. Yet he scored a Test century in all nine countries where he played and 33 in all. Or put it another way: he faced 26,562 balls and was dismissed by only 275 of them, roughly one in a hundred.

3. Kevin Pietersen

Tests played: 104
Runs scored: 8,181
Hundreds: 23
Highest score: 227
Average: 47.28

One test of genius is to do something that nobody else can do and his 158 at the Oval Test of 2005 was the first proof that KP could do that. Thereafter it was usually the first innings of the second Test of a series when England were 1-0 down: cometh the hour, cometh the knight in shining armour (though his captain Sir Andrew Strauss tried a spoonerism).

He was more show-man than team-man, but it takes all sorts, and when he was in the mood he quite simply dazzled like nobody else has done, not Wally Hammond, not Ted Dexter, not Michael Vaughan at his most swashbuckling, not Harry Brook as yet. At Headingley against South Africa, in Sri Lanka, in Mumbai and twice at Adelaide, he took the game – and breaths – away.

=1. Sir Jack Hobbs

Tests played: 61
Runs scored: 5,410
Hundreds: 15
Highest score: 211
Average: 56.94

If Ashes cricket has been the perennial yardstick, which it has, then Hobbs has never been surpassed. He scored three Test centuries against Australia in England (in three-day Tests on uncovered pitches) and nine in Australia: 12 in 71 innings. His hundred in the Oval decider of 1926 was as valuable as any in the canon.

Being light on his feet, he was always busy, like Root, and running his singles. The main difference between them? Suppose Root was unable to play any cricket from the age of 32 to 38: that is what Hobbs lost, his prime, owing to the First World War.

=1. Joe Root

Tests played: 147
Runs scored: 12,578
Hundreds: 35
Highest score: 254
Average: 51.33

The standard of pace bowling has rocketed since Hobbs’ day (in most Tests Hobbs faced one fast bowler) but so too of the pitches, which makes the playing field level enough for comparisons. In Ashes cricket Root’s record is far inferior: four centuries, and none in Australia, in 65 innings. Where Root makes up this lost ground is in Asia: apart from a handful of Kevin Pietersen innings, no other England player has batted so brilliantly there against spin, and definitely none has swept – in all its forms – so profitably.

Against India, whom Hobbs never played against, Root has averaged 58 home and away. It was there in February earlier this year, after a calamitous reverse-ramp, that Root finally acquired the high seriousness his batting needed. Only since then, while averaging 75, has he risen to a par with Hobbs.