England v India, 2018: Top 5 things to look ahead of the Test Series

#3 The daunting journey from 50 to 100s

In his last 16 test innings, Joe Root has compiled 637 runs comprising of 8 half-centuries and a high score of 83. The concerning factor is that none of these eight 50s has been converted into a century. The last century to flow out of Joe Root’s bat was when he scored 136 in the first innings of the first match against West Indies at Edgbaston and has failed to reach the 3-digit score in subsequent 19 opportunities. What’s more impeccable is that England has never lost a test whenever Root has managed to score a century.

Joe Root’s poor conversion rate

Apart from sharing elegance and class in their strokes, K L Rahul has trodden a similar path to Joe Root in consistently falling short to convert his fifties into hundreds. Rahul even joined an elite club of cricketers after scoring seven fifties consecutively.

However, both the batsmen will be high on confidence having scored centuries in the shorter formats and on the lookout for that elusive three-mark figure.