Is Root right for England?

M Night Shyamalans' hokey horror flick The Village features a superstitious 19th-century community cut off from the rest of the world by deep woods and the creatures that live in them. When a villager defies the elders and escapes, it turns out - spoiler alert - that it's 2004, and the village is a reclusive billionaire's social experiment.

Of course the entire movie is actually an allegory for the England cricket team. They have staggered into the game's new era dazed and blinking, wondering just when it all got so… modern.

How long will it take them to get up to speed? Is the gap still bridgeable?

As if to emphasise England's separateness, on Tuesday they were picking a Test match squad as the World Cup they have long been out of consumes everyone else.

There is little consensus about anything, and yet there is one man about almost everyone agrees: step forward, Joe Root, automatic selection in all formats, captain in waiting, chosen one.

He is a man over whom Boycott, Vaughan, Atherton and Pietersen concur.

"It's my sense," wrote Martin Crowe in a piece for this website, "that Root, Virat Kohli, Kane Williamson and Steve Smith will all take turns as the No. 1 Test batsman".

All Out Cricket magazine called him "the cherubic darling of the development programme". And so on…

His Test average after 22 games stands at 50.94; his ODI notch at 40.04, at a strike rate of 80; and his T20I mark at 36.60, at a rate of 126. Here, it would seem, is a man to hang our hats on, evidence that, for all of the darkness around England's cricket, the system is doing something right. James Whitaker, the national selector, is certainly quick to reach for his name when he stands before the media.

So why pick on Root when there is so much else that is so much more wrong? Why fly in the face of so much expert judgement, so much accrued personal knowledge of what it takes to make it at the top?

This is not an ad hominem piece. Instead, it is about what Root's style of batting represents. In its way it is comforting. It is of the established order. In the uncertain world that England are staggering towards, he is recognisable. As a product of their system, what he does is theoretically repeatable in others. All of these things are less frightening than the notion that they may soon disappear.

And yet disappear they might. In an interview with the BBC last week, Dave Brailsford, the man who led British cycling to Olympic dominance and then two wins in the Tour de France, was asked about the England one-day cricket team. His reply, paraphrased, was that they should look at how they need to be playing in 2019 and work backwards from that point.

So how will one-day international batting look in 2019? Like Joe Root and batsmen of that ilk? Probably not. Players like Kumar Sangakkara and Mahela Jayawardene, who you can imagine Root may aspire to become, are slipping away now.

A team may retain one guy who can score a hundred at a rate of about one run per ball. But he will be surrounded by players who far exceed that strike rate in a simple numbers game: a team that has six in the line-up can reasonably expect a couple to come off on any given day.

Men like Finch, Warner, Rohit Sharma and McCullum at the top of the order. Men like Pollard, de Villiers, Faulkner and Maxwell lower down. A raft of allrounders. A deck of quick bowlers. This is the likely future into which England must step.

And what impact will the shift have on Test cricket? It had its last big kick forwards when Steve Waugh's Australia began scoring at four runs per over and wins overtook draws as the format's regular currency. The ascent of players like David Warner, who come upwards from the white-ball formats, and the relentless aggression of the aforementioned McCullum and de Villiers et al, will reinforce the new mentality here too. Bowling will respond to such aggression with aggression of its own. The prospect of Australia's quicks laying siege to England next summer has a visceral appeal.

Root's Test batting has had its admirable calm disrupted only briefly, but it happened when he was confronted by aggressive, short-pitched fast men. His initial run as an opener was abandoned. He struggled, along with everyone else, in Australia last winter, and even during his renaissance in the summer, he was discomfited by Sri Lanka and bounced out by Ishant Sharma at Lord's. He has not yet answered that question.

That's not to imagine he won't. As all of those great players - who know far more about cricket than I do - have said, Root has a certain steel. But to return to the subject of style, he must adapt. Jacques Kallis pointed out during his revealing stint as a pundit on Sky Sports' World Cup coverage that the modern batsman is not tested until he is forced back.

It would be foolish - and actually mean-spirited and unjustified - to argue against Root's constant presence in the team. It's not his fault that his is the name behind which England's establishment has sheltered. But if they think that the answer to the near-future's insistent questions is to continue down the line that has produced Root, they are wrong. A likely top five of Cook, Trott, Ballance, Bell and Root has a stolid uniformity.

He will flourish if he is surrounded by difference, not more of the same.