The long game: Lessons in longevity from England cricketer Joe Root

Picture Joe Root at 12 years old. It’s early morning in South Yorkshire. He pulls back the curtains and looks at the sky. Not to plan the day ahead – but to offer up one wish: Please. Don’t let it be raining.

Root, 35, says that boy is still with him. Every long day in the field, every gruelling net session, every moment when the demands of elite sport feel heavier than the rewards, the cricketer – widely regarded as one of England’s greatest batters – goes back to him. “Whenever you have a long day,” Root says, “just remember how much that kid would want to be in your position right now.”

It’s a quiet reminder of what it means to build a long, purposeful life at the top of your game.

Staying connected to your “why”

Root has played more than 160 Test matches for England. He’s never missed one due to injury. He’s the second-highest run-scorer in the history of Test cricket and England’s all-time leading run-scorer. In recent years, he has arguably been playing the best cricket of his career.

None of that happens by accident. And yet when asked about the secret behind his extraordinary durability, he plays down his abilities. “I think luck is a big factor,” he says, with a laugh. “I’ve broken a lot of fingers. They just never seem to be during a series.”

But dig a little deeper and something more substantial emerges. It’s a relationship with motivation that he’s consciously cultivated and protected throughout an enduring career. “Staying curious,” he says on what keeps him going. “That’s the thing.”

In any endeavour – be it sport, business or building a life – this quality seems worth holding onto. The instinct to ask how you can get better. The ability to keep that aspirational child alive.

Root looking out at the South Yorkshire sky at 12, willing it not to rain – that’s the image to carry with you. Call it the 12-year-old test. Whatever you’re building, whatever chapter you’re in, ask yourself when you last connected with the version of you who first wanted this. Not the version who achieved it, got used to it or started taking it for granted. The one who still had everything to prove.

A new definition of success

There’s a moment in Root’s story that doesn’t make the highlights reels. It happened in 2017, shortly after he was appointed England captain for the first time – one of the greatest honours in sport. Three days later, his first child was born. Three days after that, he was on a plane to India for a Test series.

“All I’d ever thought about until that moment, really, was how important cricket was,” he says. “And then all of a sudden the most important thing in your life has just appeared. The way you perceive everything changes.”

It’s the kind of shift many people recognise: the moment when the thing you’ve built your identity around is suddenly asked to share space with something far greater.

For Root, it took time. He describes the early captaincy period as one of the hardest of his career – not because of cricket, but because of this internal recalibration. “I had to figure out how I wanted to compartmentalise different areas of my life. I needed to make sure my family felt like a priority, but still feel I could give the team everything it required.”

What emerged from that process was a quieted ambition and a different definition of success. “To start with, I was very much results based. More now, I try and judge success on enjoyment and fulfilment, and, I guess, commitment. You can’t always control the results, but you can control your input.”

That reframing sustained him through the hardest years of his first stint as captain, through COVID-19 bubbles and long stretches away from family. And it’s what has powered the most extraordinary chapter of his career since.

For anyone navigating their own version of that transition, the moment when the scorecard you’ve been keeping for decades starts to feel like the wrong measure, Root’s experience offers something genuinely useful. The question isn’t, “What have I achieved?” It’s, “Am I fully committed to what I’m building, or do I need to recalibrate?”

Part of that shift was more tactical than technical. Root says that for much of his career he was “obsessive about technique – sometimes advantageously so; sometimes to a detriment.” The change came when he realised that at a certain level of mastery, the gains stop coming from refining the fundamentals. “Once you’ve established yourself and played for a long period of time, you’ve generally got there,” he says. “It’s then a case of managing other elements of the game.” In the past few years, he’s spent more time thinking tactically – reading the game, reading the room – than worrying about his shape at the crease.

The shot that didn’t score

August 2023. First Ashes Test, Edgbaston. Third morning. Australia in the ascendancy.

Root walks to the crease and plays a reverse ramp – audacious, premeditated, over the wicketkeeper’s head – off the very first ball he faces.

It doesn’t score any runs. He doesn’t get out to it. By conventional measures, nothing happened.

“It’s not always the outcome that gives you the desired result. Sometimes it’s the action itself,” Root says.

This is his philosophy on ideas, in its most distilled form. You don’t innovate to always produce a result. You innovate because standing still has consequences – because, as he says, “if you stand still and you’re quite happy with where you’re at, very easily everyone can catch up and move past you.”

What matters is intention, preparation and conviction in execution.

Staying open

Root is eyeing the 2027 Ashes at minimum, possibly 2029 in Australia. He’s deliberately avoiding fixing on an expiry date. “Things can change very quickly, whether it’s form, whether my eyes go, whether my body doesn’t hold up,” he says, but there’s no suggestion the final curtain is near.

And when it does fall? He’s unhurried. “Hopefully I’ll be in a position where I can give myself time to work that out and see what it looks like,” he says. “I’ve got a few interests outside of cricket which I think will help manage that.”

What’s striking is the absence of a rigid plan, and how deliberate that absence is. “I don’t want to put too much pressure on it or commit too much to one avenue,” he says. “If I can find something that I really love and enjoy doing, as I have done with cricket for such a long period of time, and if I’m lucky enough to do that as a job, then of course.” It’s the opposite of a five-year plan. It’s staying curious, staying open, following what you love.

Root is already living the principle he preaches, building a purposeful life in Yorkshire with his family, in the dressing room with his teammates, at the crease with his ideas. The cricket has been the most visible part of it, but it’s never been the only part.

That, perhaps, is the real secret. Not the unbroken appearance record, not the 40+ centuries, not the reverse ramp. It’s the hard-won understanding that longevity isn’t about hanging on, it’s about staying connected to why you started and knowing what you’re actually playing for.