Joe Root never wants to feel anger of being dropped again
Friday 30 October 2015 19:02, UK
Joe Root has revealed his anger at being dropped from England's side during the 2013-14 Ashes was a kick-start on his road to becoming the world's No 1 Test batsman.
Root recently moved past Australia captain Steven Smith to top the ICC Test ranking less than two years after he feared for his international career, but still feels there is plenty of improvement he can make to his game.
The Yorkshire batsman was still emerging as an international player on his first overseas Ashes tour, and the pressure appeared to show as he struggled badly before being dropped for the series finale in Sydney.
Speaking to Michael Vaughan in the Daily Telegraph, Root said: "I felt I was starting to get my game back and thought, 'I am going to score some runs in this game' but I went back to the changing room and Cooky [England captain Alastair Cook] sat me down and said, 'It's a tough call but you are not going to play in this game'.
"I can't remember what I did for the next hour. I was gone. I was an empty vessel for an hour.
"But then I was absolutely spewing. I was so angry and gutted because I had not scored runs, not because I thought I deserved to play.
"In my first Test back against Sri Lanka at Lord's, I sat there waiting to bat and all I could think about was reliving Cooky telling me I was not playing in Sydney. I was using it as an inner motivation. I did not want that happening again."
Root said he may go back to using that motivational technique again as he looks to turn consistent scores into big hundreds - the Test series against Pakistan in the United Arab Emirates has seen him score 88, 71 and 85 but fail to reach three figures.
"A lot of people say I'm one of the top three players in the world, but top-three players don't get out between 70 and 80 eight or nine times in a year as I have," he said. "They get big hundreds.
"It is nice for people to say you are up there with AB [de Villiers], Steve Smith and [Virat] Kohli but the best players win Tests, and at the minute I am getting good scores but not going on."
