MCG double-ton showed ‘I've still got it’ – Cook

The first of England’s two Tests in New Zealand starts on Thursday 22 March, and Alastair Cook is looking back at his 244* in the fourth Ashes Test in Melbourne late last year – the only draw in the series Australia won 4-0 – to gain confidence.

Cook, England’s most prolific scorer in Tests with 12,005 runs from 152 games, aggregated just 83 runs in the first three Tests before the 10-and-a-half-hour effort at the MCG, signalling that he still has the appetite for the sort of scores he is famous for.

“To bat as badly as I did for two months, and then for 10 hours bat as well as I've ever done, is quite strange,” Cook said in Auckland, the venue for the first Test, which will be a day-night contest. “To be able to bat like that, you've got to be doing the right stuff mentally and still be on it.

“It’s an easy story to write when a slightly older player isn't scoring runs: ‘Is he going to give up? Is he thinking about it?’ When you keep piling the effort in and you're not doing very well for two months in a big series, you start doubting yourself.

“But it showed I've still got it. There were some dark moments on that tour when I could have said, ‘I don't need this anymore’, and just jacked it in. But to keep going and then deliver like that proved I've got something.”

England, who have played a lot of limited-overs cricket in Australia and New Zealand since the Ashes, warmed up for the Tests with a four-day game against New Zealand XI, which had two days of pink-ball cricket and then two days of playing with the red ball. England had two full days of batting and bowling, and Cook looked in good touch without scoring too many runs.

The former captain feels that though the selectors didn’t change things much after the Ashes reversal, the stability is good from England’s point of view going forward.

“The selectors have picked pretty much the same squad of players,” he pointed out. “It's given the guys an opportunity who have experienced the Ashes and did okay – it may sound funny, but if you marked a series that we lost 4-0, a lot of people did okay – the chance to make the jump to become fully fledged international players or someone else gets another opportunity.

“The next two weeks, like every series you play, could define people's futures.”