Alastair Cook: The man who found a way

Retirements are like buses, in that they tend to come in quick succession, and they hurt when they hit you. This year two all-time greats in AB de Villiers and Alastair Cook have called time on their international careers, and while in style they could hardly have been be more different – AB, Mr. 360, capable of playing shots no-one else could even conceive, and Chef, who made 12,000 Test runs with little more than a cut, a nurdle, and a pull – both redefined the limits of what we thought possible.

In their own ways, each inspired a generation of cricketers. AB inspired a new breed, the all-format innovator, those polymaths, like Virat Kohli or David Warner, equally at home in a gold-lined IPL jersey as in pressed Test whites. Cook meanwhile showed us the old way was still good. The man himself is “not sure if [he’s] the last of a dying breed” but look around the cricketing world and there’s a plethora of Cook-alikes. Inside the top 15 of the MRF Tyres Test batting rankings alone there’s South Africa’s Dean Elgar, Windies’ Kraigg Braithwaite, Sri Lanka’s Dimuth Karunaratne, and Pakistan’s Azhar Ali, all of whom have a similar method to Cook.

And yet there won’t ever be another to compare with him. In terms of longevity, of pure hunger for scoring runs, he isn’t the last of his kind; he’s one of a kind. Perhaps no cricketer in history has made so much out of so little through an unwavering commitment to make it work, to find a way.

What set Cook apart wasn’t his style or his technique, but his almost-limitless self-belief, in his method and in his ability to make it fit to an ever-changing modern world.

One of the most well-worn clichés about Cook is that ‘he only cover drives when he’s in form’. Tendulkar rightly earns plaudits to this day for putting away his cover drive for the entirety of his 241 in Sydney in 2004. Cook kept the shot in his locker for close to an entire career, only unfurling it when he was absolutely sure.

On occasion Cook’s stubbornness could frustrate England fans. The degree to which he was unsuited to white-ball cricket is overstated – Cook himself would point with some disgruntlement to the T20 century he boasts when the topic came up – but his desperation to cling onto the ODI captaincy when it was clear to most he wasn’t the man for the task derailed England’s Cricket World Cup 2015 preparation. He was eventually removed as skipper less than two months before the beginning of the tournament and England exited at the group stage.

And yet, less than six months after that ignominious exit, Cook’s unwillingness to countenance quitting paid dividends – a year and a half without a century in Test cricket, which included a series loss at home to Sri Lanka, had heaped pressure on his position as Test captain. Cook resisted, and by the end of the 2015 summer had overseen England reclaiming the Ashes from Australia.

Even that achievement would only rank third in Cook’s collection of career accolades, with the two at the top undoubtedly his Player of the Series performances in England’s two greatest overseas series wins of the last 30 years – in Australia and 10/11, and in India in 13/14.

In pure cricketing terms, it’s the latter of those that stands out as one of the all-time great series-defining performances. The conditions were more alien, Cook received less support from his teammates, England had to come from behind, and there was the added burden of captaincy to contend with.

Cook made three centuries in the series.

The first, a defiant 176 in Ahmedabad made while following on, couldn’t prevent a fifth defeat in six Tests in Asia for England, but it did show that keeping out India’s spinners wasn’t an impossibility.

The second at Mumbai was overshadowed by Kevin Pietersen’s totemic 186, but deserves to be remembered in its own right. Cook played with a fluency and command that belied the nature of a track which turned the most out of any that series – England’s spinners Graeme Swann and Monty Panesar shared 19 wickets between them, bowling India out for 145 in the second innings.

His 190 in the third game, ended only by a run out, demonstrated his utter mastery of conditions he conquered like few others have managed to.

In the eyes of England’s fans however, nothing could compare to his exploits in the 10/11 Ashes. Not since 86/87 had England triumphed Down Under, and had at one point in the intervening years lost eight straight series. They entered the series with high hopes, but when Cook began his second innings of the series late on day three – England having conceded a first-innings lead of over 200 – a similar tale of woe looked inevitable.

He remained unbeaten for over 10 hours and 428 balls, returning finally with 235 runs to his name and England 517/1. Draw secured, tone set. Two more centuries followed in Adelaide and Sydney as Cook tallied up 766 runs in the series, second only to Hammond’s 905 runs in the 28/29 Ashes.

With his feats in that winter etched forever into cricketing history, they take on an air of inevitability. This was Cook, destined since long before his ton on debut, to be the man who would break all national records, finally batting forever as we always knew he could. And yet it so nearly didn’t happen.

In the 2010 summer he was in torrid form. An Ashes tour was on the horizon, and having made six in the first innings of the penultimate Test of that summer, at The Oval, had at most three chances to improve on a high score of 29 from eight innings and, most likely, prevent himself from being dropped.

“I scored a few hundreds, but this, my 13th, definitely was the most important,” he told Wisden. “I stripped off, I went back to my old technique. You can always improve your technique, but I had changed it dramatically, andI didn’t feel very natural doing it. And then when I really struggled to score any runs, went back to my old technique and it kind of happened.”

It wasn’t pretty – with Cook it often wasn’t – as three edges passed unimpeded through the slips, and his hundred came up with an overthrow. But it demonstrated his mental fortitude. Time and again Cook has had to recover from bouts of poor form, from being written off as too limited, as a player and as a tactician. Time and again he has found a way.

And now to The Oval he returns. As in 2010 his recent form is poor. But this time there is no winter tour to book himself on, no questions to answer. Were he to make a score, it might count as one of the least important of his career. Whether he gets 0 or 100, the crowd will roar one last time in appreciation. It is no less than he deserves for all that he has done and given to England and world cricket.