• Source:JND
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Joe Root smashes double century: England's star Test batter Joe Root, scored his sixth double century in the longest format and continued his domination against the Pakistan bowlers on the fourth day of the series opener in Multan. Root scored his double century off 305 balls after scoring his maiden hundred in Pakistan.

Joe Root was quite fortunate in the first session on Thursday as Babar Azam dropped his catch when he was batting at 186 and Naseem Shah couldn't get the team the much-needed breakthrough. Root took full advantage of that situation and went on to achieve another brilliant milestone in the longest format against Pakistan.

This was his sixth Test double century. He broke Alastair Cook's record of scoring the most double tons for England. The 33-year-old Root is just behind Walter Hammond's tally of scoring seven double-tons in a Test for England.

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Most double hundreds for England:

Walter Hammond - 7

Joe Root - 6

Alastair Cook - 5

Leonard Hutton - 4

After scoring 183 runs on the fourth day, Joe Root also became the first England batter to have scored 20,000 runs across all formats. He is currently just the second active cricketer to have achieved this milestone after Virat Kohli, who too has scored these many runs in all three formats of the sport.

He is just the 13th player and the first since AB De Villiers to have achieved the milestone of scoring 20,000 runs across all formats.

Most international runs (active players)

Virat Kohli- 27,041 runs in 535 matches

Joe Root- 20,000 runs* in 350 matches

Root has been continuously breaking records since he is in some sublime form in the longest format. On the third day, he also broke Alastair Cook's record by scoring 12,472 runs and became England's highest run-getter in the longest format.

Root came back to Pakistan after scoring just one half-century in the three matches that he played the last time they visited this country in 2022. But he bounced back by scoring a century and helped his team bounce back while chasing a mammoth target of 556 runs during the first innings.

This is the fifth time that he has scored more than 1000 runs in a single year. He is on the verge of breaking Sachin Tendulkar's long-time standing Test record of 15,921 runs. England skipper Ben Stokes and Alastair Cook are hopeful that he will break Sachin Tendulkar's record and thus emphasize his hunger to score big in Test cricket.