England test captain Joe Root, while batting in the first Ashes test match against Australia in Brisbane earlier today, went past his childhood hero Michael Vaughan and created a New England record of scoring most test runs in a calendar year.
Vaughan, another former England captain and someone whom Root idolised as a cricketer growing up, scored 1481 test runs back in 2002 when he had a great Ashes summer in Australia. Root, as he got to the score of 27 at the Gabba, broke Vaughan’s record.
Root currently has 1541 test runs to his name in the ongoing calendar year and he still has a couple of test matches to play after the one he is playing at the moment. The 30-year-old is currently unbeaten at the score of 86 in the second innings at Gabba.
The surface at Gabba seems to have eased a little bit as compared to how it played on the first day of the game. The first session would be key for Root and the other England batsmen tomorrow, but if Root manages to convert his unbeaten half-century into a big hundred or a double hundred, he might get close to the Pakistan batsman Mohammad Yousuf, who presently holds the world record of scoring most test runs in a calendar year.
Yousuf had an insane run of form in test match cricket in 2006, where he scored 1788 runs, playing just 11 test matches. A lot of batsmen have gone on a run-scoring spree in various calendar years, but nobody since 2006 has looked like getting anywhere close to Yousuf. It seemed an unsurmountable tally.
Joe Root might go past the tally of Ricky Ponting and Sachin Tendulkar tomorrow
With 5 uncompleted test innings and only a margin of 247 test runs to cover, Joe Root has a realistic chance of not only getting close to Yousuf’s world record but possibly breaking it as well. However, on his way to Yousuf, Root would be crossing the tally of quite a few legends of the game.
The root is only 4 runs away from crossing the tally of the former Australian captain Ricky Ponting who scored 1544 test runs in 2005. Although Australia famously lost the Ashes series of 2005 after a long time and Ponting was the captain of Australia, but he personally had a good time with the bat right through the year.
Next up for Root after Ponting would be the Indian legend Sachin Tendulkar who had a 1562,-run calendar year in 2010. It’s remarkable, given the fact that Sachin debuted in 1989 and his peak was around the late 90s and early 2000s, but he still scored more than 1500 test runs in a single calendar year in 2010.
