Joe Root, Rashid Khan scale lofty cricketing peaks, and look primed to scale higher mountains

Over the last week, the cricket world witnessed two significant landmarks being reached by two seemingly contrasting modern-day stalwarts of the sport. There isn’t much that connects Joe Root and Rashid Khan on the field — the two have only come up against each other for 16 deliveries in all professional cricket.

During England’s third Test against the West Indies in Edgbaston, Root became the seventh batsman to reach 12,000 runs. Being seventh to a milestone does not warrant any special status. But Root has reached the landmark aged 33 years, 210 days – the second-youngest ever and only marginally older than his former captain Alastair Cook (33y 13d).

With a few years presumably left in his playing career, Root can now have a shot at Mt. 15,921 – the peak in whites set by Sachin Tendulkar.

Over in Manchester on Monday, Rashid notched up his 600th T20 wicket playing for Trent Rockets in The Hundred. Rashid thus dashed into rare air, becoming only the second bowler after Dwayne Bravo to achieve the feat. It took the West Indian 16 years and 538 innings to reach the mark. Rashid got there in nine years, with 17 distinct teams in 438 innings. At 25, the Afghan leggie is already a bona fide T20 legend. Like Root, he too can aim for the pinnacle of his favoured format – 1,000 T20 wickets – a feat that seems to defy logic.

The Root phenomenon

Root has already played 143 Tests, the 14th-highest of all time. He is a stalwart among active batters, including the ‘Fab 4’. Virat Kohli, Steve Smith and Kane Williamson made their Test debuts before Root but are well below the Englishman in terms of matches and runs.

It also boils down to the fact that England has played the most Tests (145) since Root’s debut in December 2012. He has featured in all but two of those games and missed none due to injury. His 143-match tally is way ahead of other leading teams in Australia (119) and India (112) in the period too. He was dropped once for England’s fifth Ashes Test in Australia in January 2014 before playing 77 consecutive matches. His next miss was a June 2020 Test against West Indies for the birth of his child.

Even as Australia remains a country (892 runs at 35.68) he has yet to conquer, Root’s overall consistency has pulled him ahead of the rest.

In the decade between January 1, 2011 and December 31, 2020 – Root scored the most runs (7,823) in the joint-most innings (177) alongside Cook. However, Root’s average (47.99) was lower than those of his contemporaries Kohli (53.41), Smith (64.09), David Warner (48.94) and Williamson (53.32) for a 6,000-run cut-off in the period. His home-and-away splits held a considerable difference with a bias to English conditions.

However, Root has rebuilt his pedigree over the last three years, achieving runs across conditions and doubling his fifty-hundred conversion rate from 25 to 50 per cent. Since 2021, Root has piled on a staggering 4,204 runs in 84 innings with 15 hundreds – nearly 1.7 times more than the second-placed Usman Khawaja (2,526). That makes up almost 53 percent of the runs he scored in the previous decade. Root needs 3,799 runs to match the same tally this decade. If he scores that many runs, he will get to 15,826, only 95 short of Tendulkar’s tally!

With his role primarily pinned to Tests, Root can have a decent crack at achieving all the mentioned targets, given that England will continue to play a lot of red-ball cricket in the foreseeable future. According to the Future Tours Program (FTP), England are slated to play nine more Tests this year and a total of by the end of the 2026 season.

Globetrotting wizard

Standing on the threshold of becoming the highest-wicket-taker in all T20s, Rashid too can likely knock off 1,000 scalps. He is 29 wickets short of surpassing Bravo (630) for the record, exemplifying unparalleled consistency with the ball in a relatively short career.

🏔️ 6 0 0 ✅

Thank you all for your love and support always 🙏#T20 #T20Wickets pic.twitter.com/5M90hyhZ5p

— Rashid Khan (@rashidkhan_19) July 30, 2024

Rashid remains an almost robotic threat across the world. No conditions have put a lid on his craft, from the Americas to Australia. In no country does the Afghanistan captain average more than 23.5 with the ball. Neither does he concede more than 7.55 runs per over, as he has in T20s in England. Having played only 15 of his 442 T20s at home in Afghanistan, Rashid’s wicket-taking prowess seems all the more bewildering.

Between 2017 and 2023, Rashid has racked up at least 65 wickets every calendar year save 2020, including a record 96 in 60 matches in 2018. No other bowler has managed that feat more than twice. His economy has witnessed negligible fluctuation in this period, and his strike rate this year (15.3) is his best in five years.

His career economy of 6.47 is only bettered by Sunil Narine (6.12) among all bowlers who have aggregated at least 300 wickets in the format. One may associate ‘bowled’ dismissals the most with the likes of the slingy Lasith Malinga, but Rashid has already etched a whopping 196 bowled dismissals to his name – the best among all bowlers. Coupling it with leg-before dismissals, Rashid extends his record to 327 dismissals, more than 50 percent of his career tally.

With age on their side, both Rashid and Root’s achievements may be extrapolated to the almost preposterous-looking feats of 1,000 T20 wickets and 16,000 Test runs respectively. The realisation of it will hinge on fitness, the wear and tear of age, and hunger.

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