It had been a long day's journey into night for Paarl Royals. The sharp end of their Monday started with an hour's bus ride to Newlands in mid-afternoon. Now they were preparing to make the return trip, which would get them home at around 11pm. Between their coming and going, Mumbai Indians Cape Town won their SA20 fixture convincingly by 33 runs.

Yet Joe Root, looking taller than he does on the field, bounded into the room as if he wasn't subject to the laws of gravity, much less the disappointment of defeat. He quipped a cheery greeting to all present, and sat down behind the microphones.

Root is 34. He had just played his 871st game of cricket, and his second in three days. His next match loomed two days later. How did he manage all that and avoid becoming jaded?

"You've got to use your downtime properly and find things that you enjoy doing off the field," Root said. "See that you're fresh, that your mind's fresh and you can go and enjoy the games ..."

He paused, and seemed to decide he didn't like the tone of his answer. So he flicked a switch.

"When you're playing a tournament like this, it's so much fun. It's such a great atmosphere and there's such a good feel to it. You turn up excited anyway. You're not too worried about the schedule because you're looking forward to the next game - another opportunity, another great crowd, another brilliant ground.

"It doesn't take too much to get excited. As long as you're smart and look after your body and do the right things in preparation, then it's great to turn out again and hopefully right all the wrongs that happened tonight."

Perhaps it helped that the bus would take Root and his teammates back to a luxury hotel surrounded by a Jack Nicklaus-designed golf course sprawled in the bosom of the Cape winelands. Whatever the results, it's difficult to get down on yourself when life is so good.

"I love being here; I'm really enjoying my time with the Paarl Royals," Root said. "The tournament itself is fantastic. I feel lucky to be here."

Who said Yorkshiremen were dour, no-fours-before-lunch types? Happily, they're not all Geoffrey Boycott.

Maybe Root was a kid finally inside the T20 candy shop, having spent so long outside with his nose pushed against the window. Root had played 77 Tests, 121 ODIs and 28 T20Is - and was nine days short of his 28th birthday - when he finally played his first franchise T20, for Sydney Thunder against Melbourne Stars in Canberra in December 2018.

But Root played only four games in that edition of the BBL, and didn't reach 20 in any of them. He was back the next year, but featured in just three matches.

His IPL experience is limited to three games for Rajasthan Royals in 2023. He didn't bat in two of them and scored 10 in the other. Root might have been back for last year's tournament, but he withdrew a day before the player retention deadline to focus on England's Test tour of India that preceded the tournament.

Root is a modern great. In Tests, he averages 50.87 and has scored 36 centuries in his 278 innings. He is England's leading run-scorer in the format with 12,972. That's 500 more than second-placed Alistair Cook, who had 13 more innings than Root. In ODIs, only Eoin Morgan has made more runs for England than Root: 75 more. But Morgan had 47 more innings.

The T20I picture is different. Root only just sneaks into England's top 10 runscorers with 893. The nine players above him have more than a thousand runs each, and three of them more than 2,000. In strike rate terms, he is 20th with 126.30.

There is no doubting Root's quality as a cricketer. Just as there is no question that he has been significantly more successful in the other two formats compared to in the shortest. That doesn't mean he doesn't want to play it.

"I'm just so grateful to get the opportunity to play some T20 cricket. I'm desperate to do well for the team for [giving me] that opportunity. It's been a long time coming to really get some consistent opportunities in this format for me, just with the international schedule as it's been and obviously with playing a lot of Test cricket.

"When I was captain [in 64 Tests from July 2017 to March 2022], I had to try and take rest and that generally happened during T20 tournaments. Our Test matches fall during the T20 Blast, so I've had a few goes in The Hundred. But that makes it quite difficult to play a volume of T20 cricket.

"I just love the format. But, for a big part of my career, I've not played a huge amount of it. So it's nice to get a block of it and be involved in it."