0The Ashes urnSecond Ashes Test — Walking in a Yorkshire Wonderland

There’s not much to say on the last couple of days – basic­ally Eng­land have ground Aus­tralia into dust. That’s my sum­mary. Eng­land lead by 566 runs with wick­ets and time in hand. Pretty comfortable.…

Instead I’m going to con­cen­trate on today’s hero, Joe Root.

“I were chuffed to bits”…so said Joe when asked to reflect on his stu­pendously good ‘mega ton’ he scored today. I was rather happy too.

After a couple of low scores after his switch from late middle order bats­man to open­er I was begin­ning to won­der if the pro­mo­tion up to the top of the order, although not the nat­ur­al pro­gres­sion, was per­haps a little early. What rub­bish! And about as accur­ate as my pre­vi­ous cri­ti­cism of Ian Bell for not scor­ing enough runs when it really mattered (anoth­er lovely half cen­tury for him today)

Today’s unbeaten ton for Root was as good as they come. I’ve just watched the high­lights. And watched them again. And I’ve saved them for anoth­er view­ing tomor­row. It was glor­i­ous TV. Some of the shots he played defied logic. The place­ment he found was simply incred­ible. I don’t think I actu­ally saw him hit a ball par­tic­u­larly hard and yet he scored 20 bound­ar­ies (includ­ing two sixes). At the crease he looks in many ways like a car­bon copy of Michael Vaughan. And he plays some glor­i­ous shots like him too – but he can also shift through the gears in a way that few oth­er bats­men can. So he star­ted the days play fairly cir­cum­spect, block­ing the ball and play­ing each deliv­ery on its mer­its, then once he had registered his ton he hit anoth­er 50, this time in less than 70 balls. That’s not a bad one day rate.

The only two Eng­lish bats­men of recent times who I have seen switch the pace so seam­lessly are Gra­ham Gooch and Kev­in Pieterson.…not bad play­ers to look to emulate.

And where does young Joe hail from? Well God’s own county, YORKSHIRE. The mighty county keeps on deliv­er­ing top class play­ers for the Eng­land team. First up Tim Bresnan made a major dent in the Aus­sie bat­ting line up and then fol­lowed it up with an excel­lent and highly frus­trat­ing (for the Aus­sies) innings with the bat. And then Joe steps up and hits a ‘daddy’ ton.

As if the likes of Fred True­man, Geof­frey Boy­cott, Dar­ren Gough and Michael Vaughan weren’t enough, York­shire con­tin­ues to provide an unbreak­able line of (Shef­field) steel to our nation­al side. Even bet­ter – the one Aus­trali­an to make any impact in this match – Ryan Har­ris – he played a bit for York­shire too! All togeth­er now, YORKSHIRE, YORKSHIRE YORKSHIRE.

Oh by the way…as Joe Root, Jonny Bair­stow and Tim Bresnan lord it up over the Aus­sies, their county of birth still man­ages to do very well thank you very much without them. They’ve just beaten Derby­shire by a whop­ping innings and 113 runs with new cub off the block Alex Lees smash­ing the attack for 275 not out. That’s more than Derby­shire man­aged in either of their innings in total.

The future’s bright, the future’s Yorkshire.

Leave a Reply