The numbers behind Root's rise to the top

Joe Root has had a 2021 to remember in Tests and it doesn't look like he's done just yet. With two more matches to go against India, Root will be looking to do what he has done since the turn of the year - pile on heaps of runs and win Test matches for England.

His numbers in Tests so far this year are staggering - 11 matches, 1398 runs, which include six centuries, at an average of 69.90 and a high score of 228. The fact that the second-most prolific men's batter this year, Rohit Sharma, is 630 runs behind Root just goes on to show how the England captain has been in a league of his own in 2021.

Root started the series ranked fifth in the ICC Men's Test Rankings for batters. Three Tests, three hundreds, one fifty and 507 runs later, he has leapfrogged Virat Kohli, Marnus Labuschagne, Steve Smith and Kane Williamson to the top of the pile.

Root has had to wait a long time to reach the summit once again - 5 years, 8 months and 11 days, in fact. He was last on top of the Test batters' rankings on 21 December 2015, before Kane Williamson displaced him. Now, in September 2021, it is Root who has dethroned Williamson as the best Test batter, a spot he had held since he got his hands on the World Test Championship mace in June.

What hasn't changed, however, is the monopoly of the Big Four over the top spot amongst Test batters. One has to go as back as far as November 2015 to when one of Kohli, Root, Williamson and Smith was not on top of the rankings - back when former Proteas star AB de Villiers was still ruling the roost in international cricket.

Root's achievements don't just end there. After the latest update, he is just one point short of the career-best rating of 917 that he attained in August 2015 after scoring 130 in their innings-win over Australia at Nottingham that helped England regain the Ashes.

At 916 points, he's also in the elite company of Len Hutton, Jack Hobbs, Peter May and Denis Compton, who are the only English batters who have achieved more rating points than what Root currently has.

While the England captain is in the form of his life, his India counterpart has endured a difficult spell in Test cricket lately. With just one fifty and an aggregate of 124 runs in the three Tests so far, Kohli, who sat fourth in the rankings before the series began, has fallen to 766 rating points, his lowest since November 2016, and occupies the sixth spot.

Rohit Sharma, who has enjoyed a new lease of life since he started opening in Test cricket in 2019, has broken into the top five for the first time in his career, attaining a career-best ranking (5) and rating (773) in the latest update. This also marks the first instance since November 2017 when someone apart from Kohli has occupied the spot of the top-rated Test batter for India - Cheteshwar Pujara being the last player to do so.

Despite all the movement in the rankings, the focus of all the players will still be on winning the series that's poised at 1-1 going into the fourth Test at The Oval, starting Thursday, 2 September.