Joe Root to miss England T20Is in order to play IPL

The England Test captain, Joe Root is having a dream run with the bat. The 27-year old Yorkshire batsman is scoring runs in all three formats of the game. However, England recently lost the Ashes series to Australia 0-4. He took the responsibility of captaincy after the former captain Alistair Cook resigned from the post.

He is currently playing the Gillette ODI series against the Aussies. The Brits have won the series 3-0 already with two more matches to go. Joe Root did well in the ODI series so far and was dismissed only once in the three matches. He also came handy with the ball with some impressive off-spin. However, Root will be missing out in the T20 tri-series to be played by England alongside Australia and New Zealand which gets underway from the 7th of February.

‘I hate missing games for England‘

Root is reluctantly missing the T20s against Australia and New Zealand and said he can understand why the decision will be questioned. He admitted that he felt uncomfortable missing out for England in order to play in the IPL. Also, it means Root is missing England games when he could, in theory, have opted out of playing in the IPL instead, using that period before the English summer to recover from a long winter.

“I hate missing games of cricket for England. It is something that doesn’t really sit well with me either. It was a long, hard decision that me and Trevor had to come to,” said Root, speaking about the IPL for the first time since his entry was confirmed last week.

Both him and coach Trevor Bayliss had to come to a consensus to manage his workload. Earlier, Root wanted to play both the IPL as well as the tri-series. Root has never played in an overseas league and his Twenty20 experience is restricted to England and Yorkshire.

The IPL experience and benefits

Root also added that “You look at the amount of cricket that we have got coming up and the opportunity that the IPL brings and you almost have to look at it as more of an investment for my game and for all the England team moving forward. If being involved in that block of cricket, with everything that tournament brings, is going to add more to my game for the next four or five years then missing a few games here might be worthwhile.”

Speaking of the financial factors and the experience, he said “Of course, there is a money side to it, there is no point lying about it. That is obviously a benefit of playing in the IPL but that is not why I went into the auction. I really believe playing a block of Twenty20 cricket with that scrutiny, being under pressure for long periods of time against the world’s players in that format would be a great opportunity to develop and learn my white-ball game”.

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