Why are England moving Joe Root back to No 3?

England's red-ball reset has begun.

Ashley Giles, Chris Silverwood and Graham Thorpe were relieved of their duties and then, rather more surprisingly, so too were James Anderson and Stuart Broad, at least for the forthcoming tour of the Caribbean.

But amid the discussion of the rights and wrongs of leaving 1,177 Test wickets behind, a seemingly small but rather significant change to how England plan to set up against the West Indies has gone under the radar.

Joe Root may have clung onto the captaincy, but he has relinquished his favoured spot at No 4 in the batting order and will instead come in at first drop - a decision that interim managing director Sir Andrew Strauss insists was instigated by the skipper.

"The first thing he [Root] said in selection was that he was very keen to bat three moving forward," Strauss told Sky Sports News.

"That came from him; that was his request. And I think everyone agrees that that's probably a healthy thing for the England cricket team at the moment."

The difference between three and four may not seem like much but it is substantial enough that the debate over which of the two positions Root should occupy has been bubbling under - occasionally coming to the boil - for a good five or six years now.

Well, it had been until the England skipper appeared to have put it to bed once and for all with his extraordinary 2021. Batting at four, he scored 1,708 runs at 56.85 with six hundreds.

In a dismal year for England, he was a rare positive so the decision, apparently his own, to try and fix the one component of the batting line-up that wasn't broken is a strange one.

"It's an interesting one because a couple of years ago I was calling for that," former England captain Nasser Hussain told