Alistair Cook

Too tall to ever be considered elegant, Alistair Cook is a left-handed opening batsman that defies convention. Many who have gone before and just as many today have given the left-handed opener an artistic persona, one defined by elegance, grace and ultimately in most cases, fragility. Cook, for better or worse, is none of the above. For every boundary that David Gower stroked through the covers, or for every time Phil Hughes goes about warming second slips hands, Cook has grabbed a leg-side single off his pads: tenfold.

Safe to say then that Cook has his own style. A style which is characterised a lot more by strength of mind than flicks of the wrist. One which is far removed from any stereotypical notion of the left-handed batsman that the mind conjures. However astonishing it may seem, Cook still appears to collect more than his fair share of criticism for this. I have heard pundits describe him as gangly, slow and even boring. Despite this the facts remain: Cook is the second youngest batsman ever to reach 5,000 test runs and looks set to break yet more records as he is still only 27.

766 of his 5,000 odd runs came in the 2010-11 Ashes series at an average of 95.75. We will all do well to remember that Cook was by no means first on the team sheet for this series. Perhaps it was only the lack of a suitable replacement that guaranteed his inclusion after relative failures during the summer of 2010. But if there was ever an example of a boy becoming a man, this was it. Against an albeit dubious Australian attack, Cook imposed his own brand of opening, batting literally for days on end in some cases and notching up plenty of his self styled ‘daddy hundreds’. With his wicket growing in significance, Cook only got better, refusing to quench his thirst for runs. His return in this series was no more than he deserved. Mechanically beautiful.

The expression ‘machine’ seems to be banded around the sporting world quite liberally these days. Often, I find myself sniggering at such a metaphor, Imagining Wayne Rooney as a Dyson DC04 or Ding Jun Hui as some sort of virtual pet. But in the case of Cook, I can think of none better. Whether he is building a meaningful opening partnership or wickets are falling around him, Cook continues to mechanically construct his innings like a finely tuned classic car engine.

Maybe this solidity goes some way to explaining much of the criticism levelled at him. Some may see this approach as one dimensional and inflexible. Indeed, some may view him as an engine without a gearbox, chugging along and incapable of stepping up his run rate when needed. To me however, this is fanciful. Cook is surrounded by the likes of Bell, Pietersen, Morgan and Prior who can all be relied upon to return a strike rate knocking on 150.00 and Cook bats with this in mind. To keep with the metaphor – if it aint broke, don’t fix it.

In the week that Virender Sehwag has just walloped 220 in 149 balls in an O.D.I it may not be in vogue to suggest that Cook is just as valuable in this arena as he is in his sanctuary of a test match. He has proven he can return a strike rate of 100 in this format, both home and away and avoided much of the flack England rightly took for their grounding whitewash in India earlier this Autumn. His captaincy of the O.D.I. side is bringing out the competitor in him and this can only be good with sterner tests awaiting both Cook and England.

We wait with anticipation for the Test Series against Pakistan from the U.A.E. Cook must be in good company salivating over flat tracks which offer little for the seamers over there. But I can’t help my attention drifting toward the South Africa 2012. It will be a test which is sterner than most but I am confident Cook will continue to enthral.