There is an honours board outside the dressing rooms on the bottom floor of England Cricket’s National Performance Centre which confirms that for Joe Root and Ben Stokes, the road to Test captaincy and vice captaincy respectively goes back more than a decade.
The board in question relates to the Bunbury Festival for the country’s best Under-15 cricketers, showing which players from which years graduated to the international game.
It’s a seriously impressive list, beginning with the likes of John Crawley and Mark Butcher in 1987, and with Reece Topley the most recent Bunbury player to have earned selection for England, as his Under-15 year was in 2009.
But three years before that, the names of B.A.Stokes and J.E.Root sit alongside J.C.Buttler, D.R.Briggs, Z.Ansari and S.W.Billings – it was obviously a vintage summer.
“Isn’t it great that when Joe is appointed as England captain, and Ben as his deputy, we can go back 11 years to see when they first came on to the national radar?” reflected David Parsons, the ECB’s Performance Director.
“Of course the journey for both of them, and their families, started before that – at Sheffield Collegiate for Joe, and at Cockermouth for Ben in England, after he’d moved to Cumbria from New Zealand with his family.
“Then they moved on to Yorkshire and Durham – and I know they’d both be keen to stress the importance of their counties as well as their clubs in their development – and we’ve had them on our International Pathway alongside their Counties pretty much since they played in that Bunbury Festival in 2006.
“The first time I saw Joe was at Loughborough as a 14-year-old when he was invited to spend a week at the National Academy, as it was called then.
“They were both part of their Counties’ Academies, both played Under-15s, Under-17s, and then for the England Under-19s together, before they both moved into County First Class Cricket, then up to the Lions, into the senior England team, and now to these leadership roles.”
John Abrahams, the former Lancashire captain, was the coach of that Under-19s team, for a short tour of Bangladesh before the World Cup in New Zealand in early 2010.
“We had James Vince and Jos Buttler as well, so it was a good side,” Abrahams recalled.
“And although Azeem Rafiq was our captain with Vincey as vice captain, Joe and Ben were already two of the lads who people followed. You could already see the characters in them that have become more familiar now.
“They were both very hard working, but in different ways – as you can imagine, Joe would go about things fairly quietly, whereas Ben would give 100% in absolutely everything. Batting, bowling, fielding – if there was a table tennis tournament in the team hotel he’d be just as desperate to win that.
“The trip to Bangladesh was about team building and testing the lads a bit before the World Cup in New Zealand. I remember both Ben and Joe were outstanding there, as players and as people as well. It was after that tour that I said to David Parsons that we’d be seeing these lads play for England before too long. To get the recognition as captain and vice-captain is the icing on the cake.”
Graham Thorpe, the former England and Surrey batsman who is now the ECB’s lead batting coach, has played an especially significant part in Root’s later development, and his rapid progress from the Lions to being an England regular in all three formats – and now the Test captain.
“I remember the first time I saw him, when I was coaching Surrey’s second team and we played Yorkshire at Stamford Bridge,” said Thorpe. “They had a not very big, young-looking opener who got 130 – I remember asking their coach Kevin Sharp about him afterwards, so that was the first time I heard the name Root.
“Then I changed jobs and in my first summer with the ECB I was at a Yorkshire-Sussex game at Hove. Yorkshire were 60 for six at lunch – and Root was 30 not out. Against good bowling, on a tricky pitch, that was impressive – his temperament as much as anything.
“So we started thinking about him as a Lions player from there really. We took him to Sri Lanka that winter, and we actually left him out of the one-day series. He responded by practising pretty ferociously – in a good way – so we brought him back for the last game, and he got 100 not out. I said at the time it was one of the best innings I’d seen in those sort of conditions.
“Joe’s been lucky to have really good people around him at Yorkshire. We’ve always worked closely with them, and I’ve always enjoyed working with him and spending time with him, whether going up to see him or when he came down to the Performance Centre. We talked a fair bit about international cricket, what it looks like and what makes it different as a batsman. And of course he took to it so naturally.”
Now he is England’s captain, with his old pal Stokes as his right-hand man. They’ve come a long way since that Bunbury Festival of 2006.