“Like Climbing Mt Everest…”: As Joe Root Enters 10,000 Club, What Sunil Gavaskar Once Said About Achieving The Rare Feat

Joe Root, former England cricket team captain, became just the 14th batter to score 10,000 Test runs when he reached the landmark during his match-winning innings of 115* against New Zealand at Lord’s on Sunday. The 31-year-old Root is the only one among that select group of run-scorers to still be playing Test cricket. Indian cricket team legend Sunil Gavaskar was the first to enter the elite club. On March 7, 1987, Gavaskar scored his 10,000th Test run in a match against Pakistan in Ahmedabad.

Gavaskar took his Test 10,000th run off the bowling of Pakistan spinner Ijaz Faqih. As Gavaskar became the first to touch the historic milestone, play was halted for quite some time as the Ahmedabad crowd entered the field to congratulate the legend.

Watch: The moment when Sunil Gavaskar became first batter to score 10,000 runs in Tests

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Sunil Gavaskar scored his 10000th run in the Ahmedabad Test when he played a late-cut off Ijaz Fakih in 1987.

Gavaskar became the first cricketer to scale the Mount Everest — 10000 Test runs

Courtesy: @Zohaib1981 pic.twitter.com/c8Vqd2tla8

— Sarang Bhalerao (@bhaleraosarang) February 19, 2021

Talking about the feat and the joy of becoming the first-ever entrant to the 10,000 club, Gavaskar once told Indian Express: “I knew that I needed 57 runs. I normally don’t look at the scoreboard. But once you reach a 50, you get an applause. At that stage you realise. If I’m not mistaken, I got to my 50 with a single. So, I was aware that now 7 more runs.

“Once you get to that 10,000 it is absolutely magical. Magical because it had not been done before. Even 9,000 had not been done before, and I did it. But 9,000 is a four-digit number. 10,000 is a five-digit number, so it was almost like climbing Mt Everest for the first time.”

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Root is now part of the elite club now. Root’s current Test batting average is a fraction under 50, the mark of an all-time great, with his tally of 26 hundreds at this level exceeded for England only by the retired Sir Alastair Cook‘s 33. And Sunday’s innings suggest there are plenty more runs to come, with Root now freed from what he said afterwards had become a “very unhealthy relationship” with the England captaincy.

(With AFP inputs)