How could Sports Personality of the Year possibly snub Joe Root?

Joe Root was busy becoming England’s highest scoring batsman in a calendar year on Monday, unaware the nominations for BBC Sports Personality of the Year were being doled out.

One by one, a group of 12 chosen sportsmen and women were plastered across televisions and the internet.

Root’s fresh face was not among them. And it’s a farce.

Root’s achievements in 2015: climbing to No.1 Test batsman in the world, helping England reclaim the Ashes – posting 460 runs en route to securing the man of the series accolade – and hitting a national record 2,131 international runs.

He was a constant companion during a summer of sport, patrolling his crease as the Australia attack struggled to end his resistance. Now a supposedly mainstream sport is without representation at the year-ending awards for the first time following an Ashes triumph.

When Andrew Flintoff pulled off his own heroic series, he wasn’t just nominated... he won the whole thing. Root may not carry himself with the same – swagger, we’ll call it – and an England Ashes triumph is no longer a rare beast, but his achievements still outshine others on the 12-strong shortlist.

Of those up for the award, Kevin Sinfield and Max Whitlock stand as the most questionable inclusions. The former has an air of a Ryan Giggs-style lifetime achievement nomination – a salute to a superb career without a standout individual season. The celebratory tweet from Leeds Rhinos says as much, praising him for becoming the sport’s third highest points scorer before listing his 2015 achievements. He's humble and widely touted as a great role model. Great qualities, of course. But enough to be considered for an annual award?

Rugby league fanatics – who are expected to vote in their droves – can retaliate. Why should he be excluded if others in team sports, say Lucy Bronze of England fame, are in the line-up?

On the surface, it appears a fair point. Surely the England women’s team is better suited to the Team of the Year award, given their main challengers, the Davis Cup contingent, almost solely relied on Andy Murray. But Bronze is the standout candidate from a standout event – no one expected England to go deep in Canada and miss out on the final in heart-breaking circumstances.

Her inclusion represents a huge milestone for women’s football, helping change perception and – potentially – encouraging others to take up the sport. Sinfield can claim his call-up does the same, but it's on a far lesser scale.

Max Whitlock's is more justified: the first British man to win gold at a world gymnastics championships. But medalling on one piece of apparatus, the pommel horse, in a final that turned into an all-British showdown against Louis Smith? Impressive, but not the all-around individual gold he craved (he placed fifth).

Both Sinfield and Whitlock enjoyed fine seasons. But enough to earn a nomination over Root? No.

Not that the batsman is the only one aggrieved.

Jamie Vardy’s exclusion is understandable. While his 11-game scoring streak is frankly ridiculous – his ‘remarkable’ year also includes a racist slur. For all the non-league footballers inspired, there are those rightly repulsed by his remarks in a casino in August. And given he spews an endless stream of clichés, it’s a victory speech no one needed to see anyway.

Gareth Bale, however, almost single-handedly carried Wales into Euro 2016. Does that not deserve a nod? And what of boxer Anthony Crolla, arguably the year's most incredible story: a man who recovered from a fractured skull and broken angle trying to stop burglars, who then overcoming controversy to finally win the WBA lightweight world title.

There were also calls for disability sport to be recognised. But the panel – including Tanni Grey Thompson – opted against it. How you can do so without attaching a certain element on tokenism is the tricky point, and it’s almost certain we will have disabled athletes represented in 2016, an Olympic and Paralympic year. Some have suggested an alternative award, but wouldn’t that only fuel the divide?

Ultimately, it’s all irrelevant. The Sports Personality of the Year award is trivial – a glance back at a sporting year, with no real significance attached, and it’s nigh on impossible to agree on a cross-sports shortlist.

And yet it can’t be overlooked how terrible a decision it was to omit Joe Root. He wouldn’t have won, but he was robbed of his – and cricket’s – merited recognition.