It is seldom that a tour to Australia passes without the visiting captain having at some stage to rue his luck, and few can have had more reason for doing so than Joe Root. As a keen golfer, albeit in all too little spare time, he will know what is meant by an unplayable lie, an analogy that, with a whitewash threatening, has a fairly hair-raising aptness to it. The loss of Ben Stokes from Root’s side has been no less damaging than it was shaming. He has come already to mean pretty nearly as much to England as Ian Botham did when turning the tables on Australia in England in 1981. It would be disingenuous, though, as well as unfair to Australia’s present attack,…

Source: The Times December 13, 2017 17:15 UTC