One of the few criticisms of Joe Root, the batter – such is the world that not even the most prolific are immune to barbs and critics – revolved around his middling conversion rate in Test cricket. For someone as gifted as the right-hander from Sheffield, the argument went, the inability to build on half-centuries was inexplicable. Well, those critics have been silenced now. Quite emphatically.

In the last 26 months since Root ceded the Test captaincy to Ben Stokes, he has been a man on a mission. A mission to prove to himself, more than anyone else, that an anomaly could be corrected, that for someone as skilled as him, the ratio of fifties to hundreds needed to change. Hence, eight centuries and 10 half-centuries in his last 28 Tests, as opposed to respective numbers of 25 and 54 in his first 117 matches. How’s that for course correction?

Root’s latest masterpiece, an excellent 143 on Thursday, the opening day of the second Test against Sri Lanka at Lord’s, has taken him abreast of Alastair Cook for the most tons by an Englishman – 33. Cook, the pugnacious left-handed opener who played the last of his 161 Tests in September 2018, was nominated by the English – who else? – as the batter most likely to surpass a long-standing Test record, for the most individual runs. When he called time on his career, the former skipper was more than 3,500 runs behind Sachin Tendulkar’s whopping tally of 15,921. Unsurprisingly, Root has now been anointed the leader of the chasing pack, not entirely without justification.

Despite having made his debut nearly a dozen years back, Root is still only 33. He has managed to stave off serious injuries and missed no more than a handful of matches since making 73 and 20 not out on debut against India in Nagpur in December 2012. After his fabulous knock on Thursday, his Test tally reads 12,274. That’s also slightly more than 3,500 runs shy of Tendulkar’s iconic aggregate, but unlike Cook, he has time on his side. And a second wind, possibly because he has been freed up from the cares of captaincy that weighed him down from time to time.

It's said with good reason that every cricketer must erase the tag of ‘skipper’ from his mind when he takes guard, that he is a batter first and a captain next. Commonsensical as that is, it is impossible for the batter not to slip into captain mode, especially when the team is going through a rough patch. The last year and a half of Root’s captaincy was one of the more painful chapters in English cricket, and while he did solider on gamely, evidenced by consecutive hundreds in the series loss in the West Indies in March 2022 that cost him the captaincy, he appeared to have lost the joie de vivre that was his calling card.

Root under Bazball is a legit threat to Sachin

As if waiting for the leadership group of Stokes and new coach Brendon McCullum to exuberantly espouse the cause of positive, attacking cricket, Root has blossomed under the new dispensation, making attractive runs at a pace that is almost in tune with the demands of the current think-tank. Admittedly, he has started to make more risks – the reverse-ramp to fast bowlers is something Root 1.0 would have blanched at – and therefore has been dismissed to strokes unbecoming of a batter of his calibre, but on the risk vs reward scale, he hasn’t been in the red. Not by a long way. He has evidently got his mojo back, and there is no indication that he has any intention of slowing down anytime soon.

How realistic, therefore, that he will go past Tendulkar’s tally? Ricky Ponting, the former Australian captain who knows a thing or three about making runs and hundreds, is convinced there is no reason why the Englishman can’t do so. “If his hunger’s still there, then there’s every chance that he could do it,” Ponting said earlier this month. “He is someone that, in the last couple of years, has gotten better and better.”

Root must tick a few boxes if he is to surpass the legendary Indian. Foremost among them is to stay clear of injuries because the older one gets, the longer the recovery time. England play a lot of Test cricket, between 12 and 14 games a year, so Root will have enough chances to stack up the runs, but for that, apart from being injury-free, he must also retain his appetite and mental freshness. He might not even be thinking about Tendulkar, but why should it stop the rest of the world from weighing in?