LONDON: Red-ball cricket might be England Test skipper Joe Root’s main focus, but he is not giving up on his T20I ambitions.
England had a long and busy home summer with big back-to-back assignments, first with the ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup 2019, where they triumphed after a thrilling final at Lord’s, followed by the Ashes series against Australia, which ended in a 2-2 draw.
Their next international assignment is against their World Cup final opponents New Zealand in their backyard, where both the teams will first play five Twenty20 Internationals before they head into the final leg of the tour: two Tests at Bay Oval and Seddon Park.
England have rested some of their star players — Root, Jofra Archer, Ben Stokes and Jos Buttler — for the T20I series, giving way to budding stars Tom Banton and Saqib Mahmood.
Root sees Banton as his competition, although in a healthy way, and added that he would have to “keep getting better” to not “get swept away and eaten up” by a newcomer in the T20I set-up.
“For me to get into the T20I side, it will mean that I have to keep getting better,” said the Test skipper. “If someone like Tom Banton comes in and sets the world alight, I’ve got to try force him out in the limited opportunities I get to play.
“If that happens, it raises the standard of English cricket in that format. That’s the food chain that cricket is sometimes. You have to be at the top of it otherwise you get swept away and eaten up.”
Root has made 32 T20I appearances for England, scoring 893 runs at an average of 35.72. He was England’s top run-getter in the 2016 ICC Men’s World T20, finishing the tournament with 249 runs from six games at 49.80, including a match-winning 44-ball 83 in a remarkable run-chase against South Africa in the Super 10 fixture and later, a 36-ball 54 in the final against West Indies, which England lost by four wickets.
Root added that it’s just a matter of getting into the groove with the switch in formats. “I obviously scored runs in the 2016 final and I’ve always felt that when I have had a block of that format, to really get stuck into it, I’ve generally done pretty well,” Root said.
“I felt that was the case with the last T20 World Cup. It took me a couple of warm-up games over a two-week period beforehand to really get back into it.
“But then once the tournament started, I found my way in, and felt like it was very similar to the one-day team where I knew how everyone else was going to play. Then you dovetail around them. I’ve got good experiences to call upon. I know what it’s like to have to perform in those scenarios.”