Old master Gooch offers hope for modern great Root in battle against lbws

Joe Root lets out a “Woaaa-ho!” as a ball from Pakistan’s Mohammad Ali angles in and then jags away late at Lord’s on the evening of day two. The ball flies past Root’s batting gloves and thuds into Mohammed Rizwan’s keeping ones at head height behind the stumps. Rizwan is stood back too, not up to the stumps and breathing down Root’s neck in the summer 2026 way of things.

Root offers that impish smile and shakes his head at the deviousness of the delivery. He isn’t smiling after the next ball. Ali pushes his follow-up fuller, it doesn’t zip and lift away but darts back and scuds low, pinning Root on the pad. He reviews with a weary shrug but he knows his fate – it’s his second lbw dismissal in the Test, his seventh of the summer and ninth in his past 12 innings.

After 15 years and more than 14,000 runs, does Joe Root have an lbw problem? Is this the ghost of Davey Warner’s surfboard? Will the wobble seam and keeper up combo change the face of the Test game irrevocably? Is the sky falling in?

Root’s post-match comments when asked the inevitable tell us plenty. With a glint in his eye he gave an insight into why he is one of the all-time greats: “I’ve played this game a long time, I’ve always found ways of solving those problems and working it through and I don’t see this as being any different.”

There was more than a whiff of “events, dear boy, events” about his answers. Root has been here before, from the teenage growth spurt that destroyed his technique to the only recently answered questions about his lack of a Test ton in Australia. Batting with the captaincy. Batting without the captaincy. Batting with the captaincy, again. Root finds a way.

Elite batting is an endless series of riddles to be solved, Escher staircases to be climbed, heavy-duty safes to be cracked. The job is never done, there’s never a sense of completion. Root isn’t quite Sisyphus with a New Balance blade because he actually relishes the work – the boulder feels good, the leg-befores make you think. Fixing one technical thing in a batting technique often reveals or directly results in a flaw in another, which is what makes it perpetually compelling and maddening.

Root did admit that he was “frustrated” with the lbw trend and he knows full well that a couple more similar dismissals at Edgbaston will only lead to more loose-lipped lbw chat. He knows that the caveats are there, that the balls are zipping, the pitches are seaming and the keepers are lurking. The number of lbw dismissals in Tests this summer is at 23% compared to the constant 13 % from 2021-2025. As Root said himself, a handful of his seven this summer so far could have gone either way on DRS. Not that the bowlers or the scorebook care.

One thing for which Root could be thankful is that his lbw dismissals have not all been at the hands of one man. “I went through three pairs of pads because of him,” Graham Gooch says with a laugh as he recalls his paddus horribilis against Australia’s Terry Alderman in the English summer of 1989.

For a few months the ursine run machine found himself cast as a doomed sentinel in white helmet caught in an endless cycle of ball-pad-finger-trudge. An apocryphal piece of graffiti at the time apparently read “Thatcher Out!” with “lbw bowled Alderman” added below. Cricket could only hope for that sort of cut-through these days.

When the Spin calls Gooch to ask him about that Ashes series his phone at first goes to voicemail. That unmistakable Essex falsetto clicks in: “I’m afraid our team’s all out, please leave a message …”

Which begs the question if another bit of cricketing lore is actually true, that he changed his answerphone message that summer to “I’m out, probably to Terry bloody Alderman …”

Sadly, Gooch confirms that one is untrue, recalling that at the time he wasn’t in the mood to joke: “My technique wasn’t where I wanted it to be and I needed to straighten it out.” Gooch is adamant his situation is different from Root’s: “He’ll find a way, that’s why he’s world class. Top players generally get out lbw or nick off. They don’t get bowled or caught in the ring and that sort of stuff. Joe falls into that category. So, you know, it’s causing him a little bit of an irritation, but that’s the life of a batter.”

Gooch went to see his old opening partner Geoffrey Boycott to help iron out his technical batting difficulties. “I was playing across the line a little bit too much and I made the mistake of moving more to the leg side,” he recalls. “All I was doing then was moving further across the crease laterally from leg to off, which made it worse.

“I straightened up; instead of taking a leg stump guard I went across to middle, middle and leg, and I just moved my back foot backwards. It was instantly a lot better. It was less movement; the less movement the better and you don’t want to be moving laterally.”

He lets out a high-pitched chuckle before adding: “It’s like Ted Dexter said, and it’s still spot on – ‘bat like you are stood in a bath (forward and back, not sideways), not a pisspot (no feet movement at all).”

Gooch doesn’t see any such flaws in Root’s technique and stresses again not to conflate the two. The man who has scored more professional runs than anyone else in the history of the game then sums up the batter’s relentless paradigm: “You encounter endless problems, it’s all about how you are equal to them and how you come through them. If you work one thing out and think it’s all going to be rosy, well no, it doesn’t work like that. You’re always going to have things that are going to challenge you.”

You can imagine the glint in his eye as he says it.

After his doomed duels with Alderman and tinkerings with Boycott, Gooch went on to have one of the deepest purple patches of modern batting. In 1990-91 he averaged more than 50 in five out of six series. At Lord’s against India in 1990 he racked up 333 in the first innings, his highest Test score, and followed up with 123 in the second innings – a record 456 runs in a single Test. He ended up with 752 runs in the series.

Can he look back at the Alderman summer of 1989 and the surrounding pad-based hyperbole with a smile now? He pauses for a second before answering unequivocally. “No … but I do thank Terry Alderman and have in person at many after-dinner gigs since. He helped straighten out my technique.”

Once a batter, always a batter.

Ollie Robinson’s record with the ball (so far this summer) is 23 wickets at 8.34 apiece. Robinson now stands on the cusp of a Test ton – he has 99 wickets at a remarkably low average of 19.53. That means he just pips a certain Jasprit Bumrah’s Test average of 19.79. No caveats offered – please do send in your emails now …

The Oval, August, 1992: On Pakistan’s tour of England, an exhaustive 29-match campaign across four months that would make modern schedulers balk, Wasim Akram finished with 88 wickets at an average of 18, including 21 at 22 in four Tests (he missed the first at Edgbaston through injury). His finest hour came in south London where he whistled the ball past the nose and then destroyed toes and stumps to claim six first innings wickets and secure Pakistan a 2-1 series win. “It was really good, torrid quick bowling,” Alec Stewart said. “He would rough you up and get you on the back foot – and then stick the yorker in.”

... by writing to james.wallace.casual@theguardian.com.

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