Tendulkar: I tipped Root as England’s future captain after his 2012 debut

The India great says Root’s reading of pitches and strike rotation marked him out immediately

Sachin Tendulkar and Joe Root are increasingly mentioned in the same breath, with debate growing over if and when the England batter might overhaul Tendulkar’s monumental run tally.

Amid the chatter, Tendulkar has looked back to Root’s Test debut and revealed he told team-mates then that England had found not just a top-class batter, but a future captain.

Root won his first cap against India at Nagpur in 2012, when Tendulkar was deep into the final stretch of his record-breaking career.

Batting at No 6, the Yorkshireman blunted an attack stacked with spin, spending nearly five hours for a composed 73 off 229 balls, then returning unbeaten on 20 in the drawn match.

Tendulkar retired the following year with 15,921 Test runs — the most in history — a record long thought unassailable.

Root, already second on the all-time list, is now within 2,379 runs of that mark.

Asked about his first impressions of Root during a Reddit “Ask Me Anything”, Tendulkar said he had no hesitation identifying the talent in front of him.

“Crossing 13,000 runs is an outstanding achievement. He’s still going ahead well. I told my team-mates they were watching England’s future captain when I first saw him in Nagpur in 2012 during his debut Test,” Tendulkar said.

What caught his eye most?

“How well he read the pitch and the way he kept rotating the strike,” he said. “That’s when I knew he was going to be a big cricketer.”