Last year my blog was peppered with Player of the Week entries but Alastair Cook appeared so often I decided to drop the regular feature. Now the England skipper has, at Eden Gardens, broken more Test records, he again cannot be ignored.
Cricinfo and others have published many impressive statistics and considered articles but I had to add my own ‘tuppence worth’ and not just because Cook plays for my former home county of Essex. Overtaking the likes of Wally Hammond, Colin Cowdrey and Geoff Boycott to become England’s greatest Test centurion of all time (23 hundreds and counting…) is some achievement. Few batsmen in the modern era have achieved three-figure scores at a rate of more than one in four Tests, and amongst Englishmen only Cook has done so in the past sixty years.
On the global stage, he becomes the youngest player to reach 7,000 Test runs, despite giving Sachin Tendulkar a five-year headstart, and nobody else has ever scored a hundred in each of his first five Tests as captain. That three of them have come on a potentially tricky tour of India is even more remarkable, although he did score 60 and 104 not out on is debut in Nagpur in March 2006! The other two came in Bangladesh almost three years ago. Previous English skippers like Gatting, Atherton and Hussain failed to attain a Test career average of 40 but Cook is hitting the world-class heights of 50, unusual for an opener.
When he began he certainly looked the part. With Marcus Trescothick unavailable in India, Cook opened before slipping down to three for the home series against Sri Lanka. However, when Tres retired from international cricket, Andrew Strauss and Cook developed an effective opening partnership. Both left-handers and neither well known for attacking strokeplay, they may not initially have appeared a match made in heaven. However, they played a vital role in taking England to number one in the ICC rankings.
Cook was considered a liability in ODIs but I could never understand why. A player of his calibre can adapt to any form of cricket and Cook has proved that since assuming the ODI leadership last year. Averaging 40 with a strike rate of almost 80 is very respectable indeed in the fifty-over format. So add together his calm temperament, concentration (he is rarely dismissed for a duck) and ability to up the tempo when required with some audacious strokeplay and you have the ideal opening batsman-captain.
Of course, the reason for him taking so little time to reach the latest milestones is the heavier global Test schedule these days. Hammond, Cowdrey and Boycott each spend two decades or so compiling their century tally. As for Alastair Cook - for heaven’s sake, he is still only 27!!
Player of the week? More like Player of the Decade!
