Joe Root breaks Sir Alastair Cook’s record as he brings up 34th Test hundred and becomes England’s all-time leading centurion – as the hosts finish day two at Lord’s with a huge 430-run lead over Sri Lanka

Joe Root on Saturday became England’s most prolific Test centurion and was immediately dubbed ‘the greatest’ by the man whose record he surpassed.

Root spent only the most fleeting of periods alongside Sir Alastair Cook at the top of the list, having drawn level in the first innings of this match, and his 103 in the second propelled him into the outright lead with 34.

As Lord’s stood to acclaim the first twin tons of his 12-year Test career, Cook said from the Test Match Special commentary box: ‘Quite simply, he is England’s greatest. Take it in, Joe, we are watching you and you are a genius.’

Only five men now stand above him in the history of the game and with seven matches remaining for England this year, and Root arguably in the form of his life, there is every chance Rahul Dravid, in fifth with 36, will be overtaken before 2024 is out.

His latest hundred, off 111 deliveries, was his fastest, and belied the difficulty batters have faced in a match that England should wrap up on Sunday. It has contained only four scores above 40, and Root has two of them.

He walked to the crease in the fourth over of a third day played exclusively under floodlights and later followed up the batting exploits that left the Sri Lankans chasing a notional 483-run target with a hand in both dismissals, becoming the first Englishman to claim 200 catches in Tests.

Sri Lanka, whose response to being subjected to pace bowling when visibility was on the wane was to send out a ‘lightwatchman’ in tail-ender Prabath Jayasuriya, will resume on 53 for two today when under-16s will be admitted for £15 and full refunds will be sanctioned in the event of fewer than 30 overs being bowled.

England last completed a home clean sweep in Test cricket under Michael Vaughan’s leadership 20 years ago, but it now a matter of when not if a fifth win from five is completed under temporary captain Ollie Pope and a chance therefore to replicate the 100% home record at the Oval next week.

Pope’s team resumed their innings yesterday in exactly the kind of challenging batting conditions that their out-of-touch, stand-in would have dreaded: the gloom marginally reduced by the artificial light and a fresh set of Sri Lankan seamers casting menacing shadows, armed with a ball just seven overs old.

The size of the challenge revealed itself when his third delivery of the morning, from Lahiru Kumara, jagged back viciously, sparking a concerted appeal for caught behind. As Sri Lanka’s fielders formed a jury around him to deliberate whether any inside edge was involved, the 15 second time limit to review decisions ran out, and replays revealed the noise was caused due to the ball’s impact with his back pad flap.

Genuine chances for Sri Lanka were not long in coming, however. Ben Duckett’s dare to drive policy saw Angelo Mathews snaffle a chance at first slip after the original edge to gully rebounded off the diving Nishan Madushka’s hands.

If that catch was unconventional in its execution, the next was perplexing in its origins as Pope stepped outside leg stump to a delivery from around the wicket from Avishka Fernando and pinpointed deep point with an upper cut.

During Sri Lanka’s first innings, Pope had replicated Ben Stokes’ capacity for setting traps with precision field placements, but here he copied his injured captain’s knack of picking out the sole boundary rider and trudged off having taken his series tally of runs to 30 in four innings.

It brought Root and his fellow Yorkshireman Harry Brook together for a change of tempo and a stand of 58, the biggest of the innings.

It should have been terminated much sooner but Brook was gifted a life on nine when Madushka, who relinquished the gloves for the second innings of a match he began as Sri Lanka’s third wicketkeeper of the series, fluffed a skied sweep off the left-arm spinner Jayasuriya.

The next delivery was deposited over Madushka’s head for six and by the time Brook picked him out again from a Jayasuriya drag down 25 minutes before lunch, England’s advantage had swelled to 358.

The majority of the 124 runs added thereafter inevitably came from the bat of Root: toying with Jaysasuriya in the sixth over of the afternoon, he found the boundary with a trio of sweeps, two conventional and one reverse, and then nailed a pull for four off Milan Rathnayake in the next over, immediately putting a failed reverse scoop out of mind in the process.

Unperturbed by the loss of Jamie Smith and first-innings centurion Gus Atkinson – to an audacious top-edged reverse pull – either side of that flurry, Root cruised through a couple of Lord’s batting landmarks, becoming only the second man behind Graham Gooch to 2,000 Test runs and then surpassing him as the most prolific batter here.

A well-judged two, with no 10 Ollie Stone for company, took him into the latter territory and although there was a brief scare on 98 when Sri Lanka’s re-enactment of last year’s Ashes bouncer resulted in a graze of the glove and the ball dropping short of Dinesh Chandimal behind the stumps, he made glorious contact with Kumara’s next ball, thrashing it cross-batted in front of square for his 10th four.

He was eventually last out, snared in Sri Lanka’s bumper trap, having propelled the fourth-innings target to unprecedented Test territory and set up the chance for his team to wrap up series victory today.

More to follow…