Joe Root on England’s Cricket World Cup campaign and the struggle to be somebody he was not

England’s Test captain sits down with Jonathan Liew ahead of the Cricket World Cup to discuss how he has changed his game to keep pace with the team’s biggest hitters

Joe Root runs a hand down his arm.

“I get goosebumps thinking about it now,” he says. “It feels like it’s been forever coming round. It’s the wait that’s killing me at the moment.”

We’re in a warehouse in east London, where Root is modelling the new England one-day kit by New Balance. All around, photographers and camera crews are milling around trying to look busy. PR people skim across the room with clipboards and furrowed brows. Social media influencers, who only normal people have heard of, take grinning selfies in front of the bare brick walls. It’s all good fun. Part of the job. But the World Cup is now just a week away, so close you can almost touch it. Little wonder he can’t wait to get started.

Then again, learning the value of patience is something Root has been doing rather a lot of over recent months. As he reveals now to The Independent, his journey to this World Cup has been beset with the sort of neuroses and introspection that belies his reputation as English cricket’s golden boy. In the Test arena, he remains without parallel: captain, best batsman and increasingly an emotional fulcrum. In the shorter formats, however, it’s not outlandish to suggest that he’s been going through something of an identity crisis.

Yes: that Joe Root. The Joe Root with the 11th highest average in one-day internationals. With more centuries than any Englishman in history. A mainstay in perhaps the greatest England limited-overs side ever to take the field. And yet, even as he piled up runs and wins, something didn’t quite sit right. He wanted more. Surrounded by enormous hitters like Jos Buttler and Jonny Bairstow, Root began to wonder whether his relative lack of brute force was beginning to hold the team back. Whether - in short - he needed to become more of a destroyer.

“It is easy to get sucked in,” he says now. “Because you’re watching these guys banging it consistently out of the park. And... you want a bit of that. It’s… I wouldn’t say ‘ego’, but you want to add to this score. I don’t want to be a restrictor. I don’t want to put a ceiling on what we’re capable of doing.”

Perhaps the first little seeds of doubt were planted just over a year ago, when Root entered the Indian Premier League auction for the first time. Nobody picked him. Root isn’t an egotistical man, but who among us wouldn’t take such a public rejection personally?

Then, later that summer, he was dropped from England’s Twenty20 team for the first time. For a batsman with ambitions to become one of the greats of the game, it was a severe blow. And it cemented within Root the belief that in order to become the all-format titan he wanted to be, he needed to add levels to his game, and brawn to his frame.

Naturally skinny rather than muscular, Root had never been the most natural of six-hitters. He had already been doing some work with the hitting coach Julian Wood, but over the winter he decided to take a contract with Sydney Thunder in the Big Bash in order to hone his short-form game. It didn’t go well. He scored just 99 runs in seven innings, and the team failed to qualify for the knockouts. And on his return to the England side, he resolved to spend less time worrying about what he couldn’t do, and start focusing on what he could.

“I’ve been trying to be someone else,” he says. “I’ve been trying to bat like Jos Buttler or Ben Stokes or Jason Roy. I just need to find the best version of myself. Find improvements to what I’ve already got, rather than trying to remodel my game.

“I think I got so caught up sometimes in trying to force the game, which doesn’t suit the way I play. Rather than being a little bit cuter, a little bit smarter, using my brain a bit more. Hitting balls in different areas, which are equally difficult to defend and restrict.”

It’s ironic that for all his England centuries, one of Root’s best innings under pressure was a 54 in the World Twenty20 final in India in 2016. On a tricky pitch in Kolkata, he scored his runs off 36 balls without a single six, manoeuvring the ball into gaps, running hard, making the fielders work. It was Root at his best: the maddeningly skilful craftsman who can put an opponent on the ropes without needing to clear them.

The recent five-match series against Pakistan demonstrated Root’s recalibration. After being lazily caught in his first two innings, Root resolved to take fewer risks as the series went on, cutting the big shots out of his game and earning a fine 84 in the final game at Headingley with a repertoire of paddle sweeps, dabs to third man and hard-run twos into the gaps. “If anything, the series was a really good reminder of what I am when I’m at my best,” he says.

Joe Root will captain England at the World Cup (Getty)

With time, Root has begun to reflect on his role in his team, recognising that a side full of big-hitters occasionally needs someone to grease the wheels. “It’s about understanding that the reason we get these scores is because of partnerships and dynamics,” he says.

“Look at someone like Jason. I think he really feeds well off batting alongside me because I give him a lot of strike. Same with Morgs [Eoin Morgan]. It takes pressure off him because he gets to face more balls earlier on, so it doesn’t feel like he’s wasting over after over. Little things that you learn over a period of time. It takes pressure off me, in a way, because I’m speeding things along. Not slowing things down because I don’t hit a high percentage of sixes and fours.”

More secure in himself, more comfortable in his own game, now Root is ready to perform on the biggest stage of all. “We’re just so desperate to get to the end of the next two warm-up games. I just want to get into the tournament. Hopefully we can show everyone that we’re here to win.”