Like his more illustrious brother Joe, Billy Root is a product of the Yorkshire Academy but he had to leave his native county to forge a career in first-team cricket; their father Matthew had a few games for Notts Seconds and Under-19s in the mid-1980s and played most of his cricket at club level in and around Sheffield.
Billy Root came to Trent Bridge in 2015, making his First-Class debut in the last match of that year’s County Championship against Hampshire; he didn’t play for the first team again until a similarly late season match v Somerset in September 2016. In the three years he was with Nottinghamshire, he played in ten First-Class matches – his forte had proved to be in the limited-overs formats.
Batting left-handed and bowling occasional right-arm off breaks, backed up by some electric fielding (he had been a substitute fielder for England in the Lord’s Ashes Test of 2013), he proved a more than useful team member and was perhaps unfortunate to miss out on a place in 2017 Royal London Cup Final at Lord’s. Given that he stood down for Alex Hales, who returned from England duty to hammer a record-breaking 187 to win the trophy, Root’s misfortune was somewhat mitigated.
Root left Trent Bridge to sign a two-year contract with Glamorgan at the end of the 2018 season and the Welsh club were getting a player with a good track record – at that stage he averaged over 30 with the bat in each of the three formats.
In First-Class cricket for Notts he made 474 runs at 26.33, top score 132; he also made one List-A century, 107no whilst compiling 387 runs at 38.70. In T20s, Root scored 277 runs, average 30.77 with a best of 40. He made a hundred on debut for Glamorgan and later recorded his highest First-Class score of 229.
William Thomas Root, born in Sheffield on 5 August 1992, has also played for the MCC Young Cricketers and Suffolk and extensively in club cricket in Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire, winning the Notts Premier League Batting Award in 2013 when playing for Cuckney.
May 2020
Nottinghamshire First-Class Number: 638