Do we like them?

Do we like Joe Root?

Our score: 8 out of 10. Decent and on the right side, with one awkward moment over what he did and didn't see at Yorkshire.

Joe Root is the Sheffield-raised run machine who first captained England's Test side in 2017 and stood down in 2022 after a rough Caribbean tour. Four years later he's back in the job, replacing Ben Stokes, who retired from international cricket during a series against New Zealand. He says he's a different person to the one who quit, and that he won't rip up the Bazball approach.

The latest mess isn't his. In August, Brydon Carse was reportedly handcuffed by police after a nightclub incident in Derby, right after a big win over Pakistan, and Root told reporters he was “hacked off” at the team's off-field slip-ups. Calling out your own dressing room in public is what a captain is meant to do.

Beyond that, the searches turned up nothing from Root on vaccines, climate, migrants or the culture-war grievance circuit. He has backed Stonewall's Rainbow Laces campaign through the ECB, and he's listed as a patron of the Children's Hospital Charity in his home city of Sheffield. I couldn't open pages to confirm either, so call that the honest gap in the file.

So: a straight-down-the-line sportsman who's said the right things at the right moments and picked the right side when it counted. He's not a saint on a pedestal, and the Yorkshire episode shows he can miss what's happening around him. But for a bloke who has spent a decade in the most scrutinised job in English cricket, the record is clean.