When the England cricket team announced that the 22 year old Joe Root was to open the innings with Alistair Cook this summer, they continued a proud tradition which arguably started on the 1909 tour to South Africa.
For that tour, the Yorkshire all-rounder Wilfred Rhodes was pushed up the order to open the innings with the legendary Jack Hobbs. As an opener, he was more resolute in defence than prolific in attack but provided the perfect foil for Hobbs attracting favourable praise from Wisden. At the end of his first class career, he had scored a shade less than 40,000 runs and took 4,204 wickets - both figures would be the stuff of dreams today. A career which had started in 1898 following the decision by Yorkshire to dispense with the left arm spinner Bobby Peel was to finally come to an end in 1930 at the grand old age of 43. His impact on the game was undeniable and in some ways he came to represent the dour image of the Yorkshire batsmen whose wicket had to be earned the hard way.
Just outside Harrogate 17 years after the birth of Rhodes, the man who would take up the baton was born. His career was delayed by the onset of the Great War and brought to a premature end by the Second. In between, Herbert Sutcliffe in many ways became the benchmark for all Yorkshire and England openers to follow. He kept good company. He formed a legendary pairing with Hobbs at the top of the England order from 1924 until the retirement of Hobbs in1930. Sutcliffe averaged more for England than his county and was reckoned by the top bowlers of his day to be hardest batsman to get out. With Percy Holmes, he opened the Yorshire innings from 1919 until Holmes' retirement in1934. They famously put on 555 runs for the first wicket against Essex at Leytonstone. Following the retirement of Holmes in1934, the young Len Hutton was chosen to open the Yorkshire innings with Sutcliffe. Sutcliffe's last England match was in1935 but he continued to open the Yorkshire innings with Hutton until the outbreak of war in 1939. It is impossible to estimate the value of that education to the young Hutton. On uncovered pitches, Sutcliffe averaged over 60 in tests for England while accumulating 4,555 runs. He went a step further than Rhodes before him by surpassing 50,000 runs in first class cricket albeit at the slightly inferior average of 52. His career total of 151 first class hundreds was going to take a bloody minded, focused person to go past it. That person would not come until the 1960s.
Hutton became the first professional captain of England in 1952. In 1938, at the age of 22, he scored 364 against the touring Australians at the Oval and his life would never be the same again. Like Sutcliffe and Rhodes before him, Hutton built his reputation on a brick wall defence. Step 1: don't get out - the runs will come later - and how they came. Despite losing six of his best years to the Second World War and incurring a serious injury to his arm, he still amassed 40,000 first class runs. This is all the more amazing given his decision to retire at the comparatively young age of 39 in 1955. He started and ended his test career against New Zealand in 1937 and 1955 and scored 6971 runs at an average of 56 with 19 hundreds. Hutton was just 21 when he first appeared for England and a mere 24 when he set the world record 364 runs in an innings.
There was a lull in the Yorkshire production line between 1955 and 1964. Then came Boycott. Geoff Boycott made his debut against Australia at the age of 23. Arguably the most selfish batsman of all time, he was the very picture of defence and throughout his career it was his cricket which the opposition bowlers prized most highly. His talent was limited compared to his contemporaries such as Jack Hampshire but he compensated with sheer obduracy. As a former opener myself, I know that it can sometimes be a bit of a lonely business consisting of you against them. Boycott took this concept more literally than most but tcicked off the milestones one by one until eventually he scaled the heights of Sutcliffe before his retirement in 1986. Unlike Sutcliffe, his test average of 47 was considerably lower than his first class average of 56. His 48,000 first class runs fell short of the mark set by Sutcliffe but he matched his 151 first class hundreds. Of his hundreds, the most famous was his 100th. He scored 191 at Leeds against the Australians just three matches after his comeback from a self imposed exile from test cricket. During his career, he split the county of Yorkshire in two and the county would go without the championship during his career. A leader of men he was not because the self was more important than the whole. Like Hutton before him, captaincy didn't come naturally to him - despite having an encyclopaedic knowledge of the game and its players.
In November 1999, Michael Vaughan made his test debut at the age of 24. I saw him bat in 1995 against Lancashire in a one day semi final and came away knowing that I had just seen the man who would take up the legendary baton vacated by Boycott in 1982. Vaughan was not surrounded in defence as his predecessors had been although he was a very able opener. What he did have was an array of shots through the covers which left the purists purring with pleasure. I've never seen anyone play the cover drive better than Vaughan although I'm told that Hammond and Cowdrey were the real masters of this shot. While Boycott and Hutton were insular old school openers ill disposed to the demands of captaincy, Vaughan was the exact opposite. He thrived on captaincy as evidenced by his glittering record. Like Sutcliffe, Vaughan rose to the occasion with England such that his England average eclipsed his first class average. His 5719 test runs were scored at an average of just 41 - but he also scored 18 hundreds many of which were big hundreds. If Vaughan got in, the opposition was there to be punished.
Joe Root by definition has the weight of history on his young shoulders. Thus far, he has one big hundred after three tests and that apart, he has hardly set the world on fire. It could be argued that he started the series as the bloke to whom the Australian David Warner threw a punch during the small hours at a bar. At such an hour, Boycott, Sutcliffe et al would have been in bed. Their approach to batting was based on preparation and a good night's sleep was seen to be part of that. Root still has much to prove but his pedigree at least is a good one.
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