Joe Root ends debate over ‘all-time great’ status with landmark Ashes hundred

Joe Root’s maiden hundred Down Under left former England team-mate Sir Alastair Cook purring: “Even Australia will have to admit he’s a great now.”

While he has amassed more than 13,000 Test runs – only India idol Sachin Tendulkar has more – Root’s lack of a three-figure score in any format in Australia was a major subplot ahead of this Ashes series.

He ended his barren run on the opening day of the second Ashes Test, surviving being dropped on two after England had lurched to five for two to post an unbeaten 135 in a stumps total of 325 for nine.

Darren Lehmann was among those to claim the absence of a century in Australia was a barrier to Root being an “all-time great” but the 34-year-old has now done so in his 16th Test and 30th innings in the country.

Cook, England’s player of the series the last time they won the Ashes in Australia in 2010-11, said on TNT Sports: “Even Australia will have to admit he’s a great now.

“He’s been superb under pressure as always. He is England’s best batter ever. He just gets better and better.”

Root was dismissed for nought and eight by Mitchell Starc in England’s two-day loss in Perth and facing his third delivery in the day-night Test in Brisbane, Root prodded uncertainly at the left-arm paceman.

But Australia’s stand-in captain Steve Smith, diving to his left at second slip, could not cling on to a difficult low chance and Root was from then on a pillar of defiance in tricky pink-ball conditions.

He cruised to his 10th fifty-plus Test score in Australia then survived lbw reviews on 62 and 73 before bringing up his hundred to tick off one of the big-ticket items missing from his glittering CV.

Root’s 40th Test ton was a relief to one Australian, with Matthew Hayden pledging pre-series to “walk nude” around the Melbourne Cricket Ground if the Yorkshireman did not put his hoodoo to bed.

The former powerhouse Australia opener said in a video on the England and Wales Cricket Board social channels: “Congratulations mate on a hundred here in Australia.

“It took you a while and there was no one that had more skin in the game than me, literally.

“I was backing you for a hundred in a good way, so congratulations. You little ripper, mate, have a beauty and bloody enjoy it.”

Root celebrated his hundred in typically understated fashion, kissing the badge on his helmet and raising it and his bat aloft to acknowledge the crowd’s applause before shrugging his shoulders.

England’s 2005 Ashes-winning captain Michael Vaughan said on Kayo Sports: “His 40th (century), and his most precious, has just arrived. That was the one that he wanted.

“All the talk leading into this series was ‘will Joe Root get three figures in Australia?’. Well, in his third innings of the series he’s done it off the back of a difficult week in Perth.

“For England to compete they need that man. It was a technical masterclass from England’s best player.”

Before Thursday’s innings, Root averaged 33.33 in Australia compared with a career mark of nearly 51, prompting the West Australian newspaper to brand him ‘Average Joe’ ahead of the first Test.

On Friday morning’s front page, the publication ran with the headline ‘He’s not a bad Root after all’, describing him as ‘England’s greatest batter’ and perhaps tongue-in-cheek as a ‘generational talent who has long been praised, embraced and adored by supporters and media alike Down Under’.