When play began, Root stood within 22 runs of emulating Walter Hammond, the only English batsman to make an Ashes double hundred at Lord's.
But those aberrations and a couple of fresh-air shots aside, the 34-year-old batsman was humming and brought up three-figures with a smashed drive through extra-cover off the medium-pacer Matt Hughes' first ball.
He was joined by the England Test captain Alastair Cook who described an England return for the batsman as "highly unlikely".
Any batsman who has made it as far as the international game clearly knows how to bat.
Either way, it gave Root the chance to comment on the incident the previous evening when Warner, angered by Rohit Sharma's decision to run on an overthrow, told the batsman to speak English.
"I've got to be honest, I've never experienced anything like that before in my life," said the 25-year-old former Lancashire batsman.
If so, the one-man hurricane that is Kevin Pietersen made it a particularly blustery one after any hope of a return to the England team was effectively ended by his former captain, citing a "massive trust issue" between the batsman, his erstwhile team-mates and the board.
"It's simple to check – just look up the October 2010 change to law 29 re batsman out of his ground.
England's top-ranked batsman is Joe Root: of the 13 players above him only Quinton de Kock is younger, while eight are aged 30 and over.
The 33-year-old Warwickshire batsman features among a 16-man squad, led by the returning Test captain Alastair Cook, with the Durham fast bowler Mark Wood and Yorkshire's Adam Lyth and Adil Rashid the uncapped players.
In Swann's estimation Pietersen was "never the right man to captain England" – a position the mercurial batsman held only fleetingly before he and the coach Peter Moores both lost their jobs at the start of 2009.
