Joe Root is the perfect attraction to tempt back former cricket viewers | Andy Bull

Channel 4 can help the game back into national conversation at a time when Tests have rarely been more exciting

From this distance, it looks like Joe Root is holding himself a little differently these days. You can see it in his press conferences, where his answers seem as self-assured as his footwork at the crease. Watch him at work after England wrapped up the first Test match, politely brushing aside insistent questions about whether he should have declared on the fourth evening and briskly dismissing everyone else’s enthusiasm about what he and his team had just achieved. “We can’t be happy with what we’ve done,” he said.

Root is sure of himself, where he used to seem a little uneasy, open where he used to be a little edgy and defensive. So he should be. Right now, Root has the two things any captain really needs going for him – he is in a glorious run of form (684 in six innings this year, 220 more than he made in the 13 he played in 2020) and his team have won three in a row, the last of them a length-and-breadth defeat of the world’s best Test team at a ground where they had not been beaten in more than 20 years, right up among the finest in England’s history.