Joe Root is finally a wizard in Aus after Harry Brook’s Bazball scarecrow act | Barney Ronay

In the end, even the celebration was perfect, there under that strange deep blue southern sky, in the frenzy of the game state – manic Baz energy, England’s lower order cutting away death cult style on the other side, as even the grass seems lacquered and glassy by the lights.

So yes. All that stuff. In the middle, Joe Root guided the ball away through his fine leg to complete his first Test hundred in Australia, and then marked the ball with a friendly smile and a wave of the bat, no fisticuffs, no monkeying of the back, no anxious and cutting messages.

But when you know, you know. Imagine trying to explain to someone who hasn’t followed the story why this was not only warm, uplifting, and cathartic, but also quietly epic, a moment captured forever in its own square of space and light.

A man who already had 39 hundreds in this tough formal dance of a sport has now scored his 40th. But follow the story, the craft, the bumps in the road, the pieces this thing takes out of you along the way. And at the end you have one of those great, self-contained sporting moments, the sense of emotional connection through all the surrounding hoopla, the way Test cricket in particular can make you feel like you know someone intimately, just by watching them move and work and fail and come back.

Of course, there will now be plenty of banter war cases to be resolved on all sides. Is Joe Root finally great? Is he Australian Great? Do we have enough? Numbers. Symmetry. Completion. Men in barns stroked their beards and sighed. Sometimes cricket really does feel like nothing more than lists, pencil stubs, a fussy ticking of boxes.

But there’s more to it if you want Root to be great in Australia. It’s not about one-upmanship, or the chance to gloat, to refute David Warner’s latest flash of thought. Any Australian who knows anything about cricket already knows that Root is a great cricketer. But you also want them to see it and feel it, in the way you want people to love a band you love, or a book or a place.

Joe Root is great in Australia. Win or lose, this ennobles everyone’s ashes. Although that said, if there’s still a slim chance, we still want to see Matthew Hayden naked.

Root’s hundred felt important in other ways too, not least as something solid in the series for this team, a foothold in the glacier, even a fundamental liberation. Will England win at the Gabba? Don’t know. But Joe Root got a hundred. Did Harry Brook play, if not the worst shot of all time, then perhaps the worst shot yet? Yes. He did. Brook was once again annoyingly conventional in its attempts to be wild and free, less punk rock and more the cricket equivalent of David Cameron listening to The Smiths. But Joe Root also scored a hundred.

And not just any hundred in Australia, but a brilliant one in truly tough conditions, and an innings that might well have saved his team in this series. There were moments of escalation and gear changes. After three hours of furious focus you could see Root turning himself inside out to produce an outrageous reverse whack over what was now deep, fine leg, taking his score to 128 off 194 balls with the carefree verve of a man hurling a television set from a 19th floor hotel window, and setting the 50 partnership at 50 for the final wicket with Jofra Archer as the day began to melt a little and the road to England seeped through.

Although of course it had to start with the wings already falling off, the drinks trolley floating past his ear and England’s greatest modern player ending up five runs behind by two wickets. Root was dropped early in the slip by Steve Smith. From then on he was in his most fretful mode, attacking with such gentle grace that you barely noticed as he slid into the twenties alongside Zak Crawley, stiff-legged on everything in his arc, like a security guard playing croquet.

By mid-afternoon England were 175 for three and on the starting point. Two versions of elite Yorkshiredom in the fold. Vice-captain and ex-captain. Numbers one and two in the world. And so the question was asked again. Can they be ruthless here? The answer to that was of course no.

On the one hand, Root was just himself, easy, nimble, alert, killing you softly, working out in real time how to play these angles and this series of lines. At the other end, Brook was hitting like a man in desperate need of the loo, hitting like Lord Farquharson swishing his walking stick at the dandelions.

All the while darkness was approaching, shadows were creeping across the ground, Brisbane was turning a beautiful soft green and the pink ball genius, Mitchell Starc, was preparing for the most important spell of the day.

Will you run towards this danger? Yes. You do. No viewers, no feet. Just throw your hands on it first. Trust talent, trust vibes.

The ball to Brook was full, the edge thick. There’s no world where this was a good choice, no cool dynamic where it makes sense. Australia had all but handed Brook a cue card. This is a plan. Do you want to be part of it? Oh, would you?

It was at least novel in its vileness. We have seen England beat Australia like the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz, stiff and brittle without a heart. We have seen them strike like the lion, without spleen. Now Brook gave us the scarecrow, hitting without brains. We are the stuffed men. We are the hollow men. We are an attitude, a set of slogans.

And so one half of this England team continued to collapse in stages, while at the other end Root was batting for not just his life but everyone else’s. There’s something exciting about watching this sometimes: the lack of care, the energy that makes the world burn. But it is also becoming increasingly annoying in the refusal to learn, develop and find new things. Opportunities are wasted here. We could have been anything we wanted to be, with all the talent we had. But we have decided, a fact we are proud of. We’ve become the best at being bad.

Root delivered his own silent rebuke, a triumph for doing your homework, working on your mistakes, a hundred off 181 balls, 35 off his last 19 as the day required. England are still in this series because he did it, reached his own final peak and offered a lesson in what talent ultimately means.

Are they going to throw Australia away now and turn things around? Are they going to learn to become more Bazball with brains, which ultimately isn’t Bazball at all? Not sure. But Joe Root did score a hundred.