Time’s up for bad-team bully Joe Root. How about Captain Broad?

Seven weeks ago, at the start of the Ashes, Joe Root made a strikingly clear statement. “Of course it will define my captaincy,” he said. “I’m not naive enough to think that it won’t.”

He was right and there’s no wriggling out of it now. To lose one Ashes series 4-0 may be regarded as a misfortune, as long as the captain is inexperienced. To lose two that heavily, when you have been in charge for more Tests than any other England captain, looks like a reason to resign.

Root is an honourable person who may come to this conclusion now that he’s back home with his young family. If he doesn’t quit, the England and Wales Cricket Board could well stand by him. An organisation whose predecessor once churned its way through four captains in one summer, in 1988, has lurched to the other extreme. The last Test captain to be fired was Kevin Pietersen, 13 years ago this month.

It is all a far cry from the 90s, the golden age of the Ashes fiasco. As yet another series went horribly wrong, a howl would go up in the shires: “Sack the lot of them.” Whisper it, but we could do with a little more of that now.

Root needs to return to the ranks because he has never been a natural captain and he is getting worse. His win/loss ratio is 1.08 (27 Tests won, 25 lost). If you look at the league table of the 18 England captains who have lasted at least 20 Tests, Root has fallen from eighth equal with MJK Smith at the end of January 2021 to 13th, just below his immediate predecessor, Alastair Cook.

Against the top three teams – Australia, India and New Zealand – Root’s ratio plunges to 0.42, whereas it is 3.33 against the rest. Genial though he may be, he has become a bad-team bully.

Even his batting, which can be so glorious, is patchy. Since the