There are numbers in cricket that become inseparable from the players who chased them but never quite got there. Don Bradman’s 99.94 is the most famous of them all.
Joe Root has now stumbled into his own, far less consequential but wonderfully cruel, version of the same statistical story.
Bradman walked out for the final Test innings of his career at The Oval in 1948 needing four runs to finish with a batting average of exactly 100. He was bowled for a duck by Eric Hollies and never batted in Test cricket again, leaving behind the immortal 99.94. Root’s moment came at Headingley on Thursday. The England captain needed 67 runs against Pakistan to take his overall international batting average – across Tests, ODIs and T20Is – to exactly 50 if he was dismissed. He scored 66.
Khurram Shahzad trapped Root lbw just four balls after Jordan Cox had been dismissed, ending a 112-ball innings containing 10 fours. Root and Cox had added 150 for the third wicket before England continued building a commanding first-innings lead. The result is a statistical near-miss almost too neat to manufacture.
Root is now one run short of a 50 international average
Root entered the innings with 22,833 international runs and 457 dismissals. Once he was dismissed for the 458th time, the equation for an exact career average of 50 became simple: 458 dismissals × 50 runs = 22,900 runs.
Root needed 67 to get there. Instead, his 66 took his international aggregate to 22,899 runs.
That leaves his true average at: 22,899 ÷ 458 = 49.9978.
In other words, after more than 500 international innings, more than 22,000 runs and a career stretching well over a decade, Root is currently exactly one run short of the mathematical line separating an average beginning with 49 from one of 50.
Most statistical databases displaying the figure to two decimal places would round 49.9978 up to 50.00. But without rounding, Root remains fractionally below the mark.
That is what gives the episode its Bradman flavour. The scale is obviously different – Bradman’s 100 was an almost mythical Test benchmark and, crucially, it was his final innings. Root will have another opportunity. But the cruelty of the arithmetic is strikingly familiar: a famous batter reaching the doorstep of an unusually perfect career number and falling short by the smallest imaginable margin.
What Root needs in his next innings
Root’s next international innings now produces another curious equation.
If he is dismissed, he will have been out 459 times. To average exactly 50 at that point he would need: 459 × 50 = 22,950 career runs.
With Root currently sitting on 22,899, that means he needs 51 in his next innings if he gets out.
A score of 51 followed by dismissal would leave him with: 22,950 runs ÷ 459 dismissals = exactly 50.000.
Even stranger, 50 would not be enough. If Root scores exactly 50 and is dismissed, he would have 22,949 runs from 459 dismissals – leaving him, once again, exactly one run below the 50-average benchmark.
If he remains unbeaten, however, the denominator does not change. In that case, Root needs only one more run. A score of 1 not out would take him to 22,900 runs from the same 458 dismissals and therefore an exact average of 50.
So the equation for the next time Root walks out to bat is wonderfully simple: 1 not out is enough. If he gets out, he needs 51.
Root’s own version of 99.94
There is no suggestion that Root’s 49.9978 will acquire anything approaching the mythology of Bradman’s 99.94. Bradman never received another Test innings with which to repair the decimal point. Root almost certainly will. But for the moment, the symmetry is delicious. Bradman needed four and made none. Root needed 67 and made 66.
One finished his Test career 0.06 short of 100. The other currently sits 0.0022 short of 50 across international cricket. And when Root next takes guard, one of cricket’s most accomplished run-makers will be chasing perhaps the strangest single run of his career.