Seven balls, a close call, zero runs: Root’s 10 miserable minutes in Perth

Perth: This was shaping as Joe Root’s best chance for a breakthrough Test century on Australian soil. He left with all duck and no dinner.

Root arrived at the crease at 10:59 am, much sooner than he would have hoped when Ben Stokes won the toss just over an hour earlier. Ten minutes later, he was trudging back to the dressing room with world cricket’s most famous hoodoo alive and well. Seven balls, two hits, zero runs.

This knock was so brief Root could comfortably give a ball-by-ball description without referring to notes, though it would be one he’d like to forget in a hurry.

Rarely will the planets be as aligned for success on these shores. Root’s two chief tormentors Pat Cummins and Josh Hazlewood, who have dismissed him 11 and 10 times respectively at the cost of 26.45 and 31.9, were absent. A century on the first day of an Ashes series would have been some statement.

Enter Mitchell Starc. All seven deliveries Root faced were from Australia’s man with the golden left arm.

Some wickets are the result of meticulous planning executed with surgical precision. Take Zak Crawley’s at the end of the first over when he was set up to drive a delivery which appeared the same as the previous five but just short enough to climb up to catch the edge.

This was not the case with Root, who showed that the tension of the first morning of an Ashes series can hit the debutant the same way as a man in his 159th Test.

His sparring second ball at a full and wide delivery from Starc had the hallmarks of a man who wanted the comforting feel of bat on ball even if he has trained for thousands of hours to suppress such urges.

Root’s heart rate would have soared the next over when he came perilously close to losing his wicket in the cruellest way imaginable – a run out at the non-striker’s end from a deflection off the bowler’s hand.

He was spared by having the bat in the hand closest to the stumps, saving him precious hundredths of seconds to ground his bat in time.

The delivery that removed Root came somewhat out of the blue. As well as Starc bowled on one of the biggest days of his career, the set-up to his biggest wicket was non-existent.

Just one of the previous four deliveries required Root to play, the others so short and wide that even the judgement of a tailender would not have been tested.

Among the trash, Starc found treasure with a delivery that moved away after pitching, leaving Root in a tangle – all squared up and squirting an edge to third slip, about 180 degrees from where he had intended to play the ball.

There is a lot riding on Root’s bat. Root has said he can live without a century in Australia if he is taking the urn back home to Heathrow, though the latter is unlikely to happen without the former even if the two events are not mutually exclusive.

Matthew Hayden is so confident Root will score a century he has vowed to walk nude around the MCG if he doesn’t. Even the most ardent of Australian cricket fans do not want to see that happen.

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