Of the 24 players other than Root who have played Tests for England in 2021, only one averages more than 30 - Dawid Malan.
England's collective batting average this year is currently 23.6, with seven centuries in 13 Tests.
By nostalgic comparison, in 2011, which began with Andrew Strauss' team sealing a 3-1 series win at the SCG, England's most recent red-ball victory in either Australia (11 Tests) or New Zealand (7 Tests), England scored 16 hundreds in eight Tests and averaged 55.9.
Andy Zalzman.
Blogger: the TCCB do not take the 'T' of their title all that seriously. The 100 Ball nonsense is a significant part of the problem. Batsmen learn to bat in COUNTY CRICKET!
We already have the ODIs and the T20s with largely differing squads to the test arena - and as so many of our better batsmen turn into crash-bang-wallop merchants, we are ever reducing even the possibilities for producing batsmen of test calibre.
Some of the arguments for the 100 Ball - which I have steadfastly refused to watch at all - have been trivial, trite and wholly money-based. We have stretched our resources too far and the elastic is breaking apart.
When I was young, there were 32 county matches a season. People learned to bat correctly in them and the limited over competitions - Gillette Cup, Benson and Hedges etc did little overall damage.
The last step was T20s. This split the number of decent batsmen available as so many could make themselves millionaires as have-bats-will-travel across the globe. Playing in Tests won't make you poor - but over a career you could see a decent test player earning 70% or so less than a a one day player over his entire career.
The 100 Ball exacerbates an already over-stretched situation and test cricket can die if we are not careful. There are some batsmen getting caught betwixt and between. Consider Joss Buttler. He more or less gets away with it whereas a Jason Roy cannot. Even Bairstow is caught between different formats,
This is where the problems lie.
And YES, overnight I have watched England's so-called batsmen disintegrate once again in Australia.
