Four days after Joe Root’s second reign as England Test captain began with an innings-and-103-run win at Headingley, he was standing in front of the cameras at Lord’s talking about a team-mate in handcuffs. Brydon Carse was briefly arrested outside a bar in Derby on Saturday night, following Durham’s County Championship match at Derbyshire, and the footage was public within 24 hours. Matthew Potts was pictured alongside him; Ben Stokes was in the background. By Monday, Carse had been removed from the squad for Thursday’s second Test, with the Cricket Regulator investigating and Hampshire seamer Sonny Baker called up in his place.
Root’s response was the sharpest public statement of his new tenure. “If I’m being brutally honest, I’m really hacked off,” he said. “I’m really disappointed that after last week’s performance we are sat here and we’re talking about something not related to it at all.”
The curfew he scrapped, and the trust it cost
The reason this landed on Root harder than it might have on any other England captain is that he chose to own it. His first act on being reappointed — alongside Stephen Fleming’s arrival as head coach after Brendon McCullum’s departure — was to abolish the midnight curfew the ECB had written into its July player behaviour guidelines, signed off by managing director Rob Key. Those rules had followed the June episode in which Stokes and Gus Atkinson were left out of the second Test against New Zealand at The Oval for breaching curfew. Root’s argument was that curfews do not work, and that international cricketers should “be adults”.
Six weeks later, the first serious test of that philosophy has gone against him. Notably, Root did not retreat from it. He spoke to Carse — “my first concern was for him as a person,” he said, describing a player who was “very upset and has been very apologetic” — then held what he called a “very robust discussion” with the squad after they arrived in London on Monday.
His framing of the problem was precise, and it was not about one night out. “It’s not the isolated incident itself, it’s the fact that we continually keep making stupid mistakes away from the game and it’s detracting from what we’re doing on the field,” he said. “We’re going to have to earn a lot of trust back.” Carse follows Harry Brook, Ben Duckett, Stokes and Atkinson into England’s recent file of off-field incidents. That is a pattern, not a coincidence, and Root named it as such rather than managing it away.
Headingley suggested the cricket brain has sharpened too
What makes the distraction genuinely frustrating for England is how well the first Test went. Pakistan, led by Salman Ali Agha after Babar Azam was ruled out on the eve of the match with a hand injury, were dismissed for 171 and 135. Ollie Robinson and Josh Tongue shared all ten first-innings wickets, taking five apiece, and finished with eight each; Robinson was named player of the match. Jofra Archer removed both openers in the second innings. England’s 409 was built on Brook’s 91, Root’s own 66 and a quick 51 from Dan Lawrence, with Ali Usman claiming a maiden five-wicket haul in 5-95.
- Pakistan 171 & 135; England 409 — won by an innings and 103 runs inside three days
- Robinson and Tongue: 8 wickets each; Tongue 5-46 in the first innings
- Root’s tactical shift: fielding at mid-off and mid-on to talk to his bowlers, rather than outsourcing plans as he did to James Anderson and Stuart Broad in his first stint
That small positional change matters. Root’s first spell in charge, from 2017 to 2022, delivered a record 27 wins but also a record 26 defeats, and ended with one victory in his final 17 Tests before he resigned after the tour of West Indies. The criticism then was that he was reactive in the field and reliant on senior bowlers to think for him. Headingley was one match, against a side that batted poorly twice, but the method looked different.
Lord’s is where the theory gets examined
England lead 1-0 with Tests at Lord’s from Thursday and Edgbaston on 9 September. Babar returns, declaring himself “90 per cent” fit after batting through a full session in practice, and Pakistan’s response will demand more from Root than a green Headingley surface did — deeper spells to manage, a slope to set fields for, and a squad missing a first-choice seamer for non-cricketing reasons.
Root has already shown he will confront the awkward conversation rather than deflect it. “Now, we can concentrate on focusing on what is important this week on the field,” he said. That is the sentence that will be judged over the next five days.
Sports journalist and editor at SportsPortal.net. Covers cricket, football, Formula 1, tennis, and basketball with a focus on how global sports connect with Pakistani audiences. Follows the PSL, Pakistan national cricket team, Premier League, and major international tournaments. Has reported on sports for digital audiences since 2021.
680 articles published
