Joe Root: ‘Sometimes you need a bit of luck. I had that today’

For 30 minutes, Joe Root might as well have been walking in treacle while blindfolded. He could have been out at any moment, almost to any ball. He was squared up and beaten.

Yet he gritted his teeth, somehow battled his way through it and four hours later had scored an imperious hundred, his ninth in Tests. It is the stuff of great players and it has helped England to a position from which they might establish superiority sufficient to win this series.

“I was relieved to get to lunch,” he said. “I didn’t know what was going on, I couldn’t get any footwork together and I was getting in some horrible positions but sometimes you just have to find a way to get through those periods.

“There was quite a lot of relief out there, managing to get past three figures. It’s about making sure that when you do get opportunities to make big runs you take them. Unfortunately, recently I have not managed to do that. Now is the time to really push on.”

Root and Ben Stokes were magnificent, taking the game by its scruff. They refused to be intimidated and it was reminiscent of their partnership against New Zealand at Lord’s last summer when they were united at 30 for 4 and put on 161. “Sometimes you need a little bit of luck and squirt a few past fielders instead of going straight to them and thankfully I had that today,” added Root.

“Ben takes pressure off you at the other end when he plays that aggressively that the slips come out and with men on the boundary you can run well between the wickets because the gaps become available.

“It’s just natural when you see someone like that at the other end putting the bowlers under pressure, it brings that out in your game as well. He scored at a run-a-ball and that was important. We’re scoring at four-and-a-half [runs an over] now and the quicker we can score, it gives us more chance of getting a positive result from this game.”

The man of the moment earlier in proceedings was the debutant, Hardus Viljoen. Not only did he strike his first ball in Test cricket for four, he took a wicket with his first ball, a leg-side snaffle of Alastair Cook. “There was no plan at all,” Viljoen said. “I was nervous, I would have liked it to have been outside off but I was just glad he got a bit of bat on it.”

He is a muscular fellow who came close to emigrating to New Zealand last year but decided to stay put. He said that he would never regret it. Asked if his build came from bench-pressing, Viljoen said it was all down to a couple of South African delicacies: “I don’t do any bench-press, it’s just the pap and the boerewors.”