PAUL NEWMAN: Root has to be No 1 for England's best modern batsman

It was a question, posed after the Lord's Test by ESPNcricinfo on social media, that does not have a definitive answer. You can pick only one, said the website, alongside pictures of Joe Root, Sir Alastair Cook and Kevin Pietersen.

If we are talking about the greatest England batsman of all time, then my vote still goes to Graham Gooch — although that might be influenced by my more impressionable age when the Essex master was setting the standards in a career that lasted well into his 40s.

But if we are comparing the three modern greats, albeit very different players, then it is getting hard to look any further than the man who took his game to new levels in making his 26th Test hundred in a winning cause against New Zealand on Sunday.

Interestingly, all three had plenty of support in the comments underneath the Twitter post but surely now, if we are looking for the best man in all formats, situations and conditions, Root has to be the No 1 choice.

How masterful Root has become, how effortless he makes the business of compiling hundreds look and how orthodox and textbook he is, too, in this age of funky techniques and an unfathomable trend for taking guard outside off-stump and well down the crease.

And how easy it is to forget that, for a three-year period early in his captaincy, Root looked like becoming an unfulfilled talent slipping further and further behind the other members of the 'Big Four' in Steve Smith, Virat Kohli and Kane Williamson.

Root had no problem in reaching 50 between the start of 2018 and the beginning of 2021 but he failed to convert into three figures far too regularly to be thought of as great. 

But since the start of last year he has reached 50 an impressive 13 times — turning nine into