Joe Root has nothing to prove in the great debate: Ottis Gibson

Some believe that palm cannot rest satisfactorily on Root’s shoulders until he has ticked off an Ashes century overseas.

The 33-year-old has hit four against Australia on home soil, but his highest score in 27 Test innings in Australia is 89.

By way of comparison, Sir Jack Hobbs hit nine Test hundreds Down Under, Wally Hammond seven, Herbert Sutcliffe six, and David Gower and Cook five apiece.

Along with Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire opening batsman, the Yorkshire players Maurice Leyland and Michael Vaughan both achieved three, with Sir Len Hutton, Sir Geoffrey Boycott and Jonny Bairstow each registering two.

Some fixate on such statistics but Gibson stressed: “It’s not the be-all and end-all in my opinion, because you can go and have a really good series in Australia and win, but not necessarily score a hundred.

“At the end of the day, Joe Root is a great player. He’s made runs all over the world in all conditions. In Sri Lanka, where it’s spinning; in India, he’s made runs.

“Joe will know that (no Ashes century abroad). He’ll have that on his bucket list, for sure. He’ll think, ‘Hang on a minute, I haven’t got a Test hundred there.’ It wouldn’t surprise me at all if he got one on the next tour.”

England return to Ashes action late next year, by which time Root will be approaching his 35th birthday.

Similarly feverish debate has attended the prospect of his overtaking Sachin Tendulkar’s record for the most runs in Test cricket (15,921), with Root now up to 13,277 following his twin centuries at Lord’s, and just 96 runs shy of making it a bad few days for Cook all round by eclipsing his English record in that regard too.

Root will get a chance to do so in the final Test of the summer against Sri Lanka at the Oval, starting on Friday.

Tendulkar - another Yorkshire player, of course (they seem to get everywhere) - was 40 when he played his last Test in 2013, and Gibson sees no reason why Root cannot displace him at the top of the tree.

“If he plays the amount of cricket that Tendulkar played, then for sure he will,” added Gibson, with Root having played 145 Tests to Tendulkar’s 200.

“He’s 33 years old, he’s about 3,500 runs away, and that’s generally about four to four-and-a-half years or something to get that amount of runs.

“Tendulkar was still batting beautifully into his late 30s and had tremendous longevity.

"If Rooty carries on into his late 30s, and is playing the way that he is now, then it’s inevitable, I think, that he’ll probably pass Tendulkar.”

Root, who has hit 13 Test centuries abroad (four in the West Indies, three each in Sri Lanka and India, two in New Zealand and one in South Africa), to go with 21 on home soil, broke Cook’s record with his seventh Test hundred at Lord’s (more than any other player), an achievement that Gibson felt was more or less inevitable.

“Some things are destined to happen, and I think that was always destined to happen once Root started playing Test cricket and worked out his game and worked out what he’s good at,” he said.

“His desire to score runs is undeniable, really. He just loves batting.

"He obviously loves playing at Lord’s as well.”

Then, with a twinkle in his eye, the West Indian quipped: “I’m happy to say that obviously when he came back to us at the beginning of the season, we gave him the form that he’s got now and he took that back to England with him.

“He came back here and we boosted his confidence, told him how great he was and then he went and scored lots of runs for England, which is the sort of thing that we do here at Headingley.”

For the record, Root played five County Championship matches before the Test summer, scoring 442 runs at an average of 55.25.

He hit two hundreds and two fifties, with a top score of 156 against Glamorgan at Headingley in May.