Root’s 220th catch was an edge in the first over, and it took him past Steve Smith

The catch that made Joe Root the most successful fielder in the history of Test cricket was not spectacular. Ollie Robinson bowled a good length, Abdullah Shafique pushed at it without getting fully behind the line, and Root went low at first slip and held it. Shafique walked off for a duck. It was the first over of Pakistan’s second innings on day two at Edgbaston, and the ground reacted the way grounds do when a Test match is running away from one side.

Then the number went up on the screen: 220. One more than Steve Smith, which is one more than anybody who has ever fielded in a Test match.

Twenty years of standing in the same place

There is no way to fake this record. You cannot take 220 catches in a hurry, and you cannot take them from mid-on. Root has spent almost his entire career at first slip, which is the position that combines the most chances with the least margin for error, and he has been standing there since the England team looked completely different.

This is his 169th Test. That number matters as much as the 220 does, because catches at slip are a function of three things that rarely coexist: a long career, a bowling attack that finds the edge, and hands that do not stop working when the ball comes at chest height off a seaming pitch in April. Root has had all three. He has also had the luck of playing for a country that bowls seam almost everywhere and stacks its cordon accordingly.

Robinson had already bowled Saim Ayub with the first ball of the over. The Shafique catch was his 21st wicket of the series, at an average of 6.19, which tells you something about how much traffic Root’s hands have seen across these three Tests.

The list he has climbed

Behind Root sit Smith on 219, Rahul Dravid on 210, Mahela Jayawardene on 205 and Jacques Kallis on 200. Look at that group and you notice they are all the same kind of cricketer: a top-order batter good enough to be picked for fifteen years, and reliable enough at slip that no captain ever thought about moving them.

Dravid’s 210 is the one Indian fans will know best, and it took him 164 Tests. For a long time it looked untouchable in the way that Anil Kumble’s 619 or Sachin Tendulkar’s 200 caps looked untouchable. Then Test cricket started producing careers of a length nobody had planned for. Smith went past it, and now Root has gone past Smith.

What else is piling up

Root came into this match having already gone past Ricky Ponting and Steve Waugh, both on 168, to become the third most capped Test cricketer in history. Only Tendulkar’s 200 and James Anderson’s 188 are ahead of him now, and Anderson’s number is reachable if Root’s body holds.

The batting record is the one that will get written about when he finishes. He came into this Test with well over 14,000 runs at an average past 50, and 41 hundreds to his name. The fielding record is the one that tells you more about what it has actually been like to watch him. Fourteen thousand runs is a story about talent. Two hundred and twenty catches is a story about turning up.

It might not last

Smith is one catch behind and has no plans to stop. He said as much during the last Ashes, when the question came up around Usman Khawaja’s retirement and he answered it with a flat no. He is still in Australia’s side, still at slip, still a full series away from being anybody’s idea of finished.

So the record could change hands twice more before either of them is done, which is a strange thing to say about a mark that took Root a decade and a half to reach. For now it is his, taken in the first over of an innings, off a nick that most people watching will have forgotten by the weekend.

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