Alastair Cook

Alastair Cook unfazed by Indian tactics

Teams have used any number of different approaches when trying to get Alastair Cook out in the last year. Pretty much all of them have failed. Of the 2,855 deliveries he’s faced in Test cricket since this time last year, 17 of them have got him out.

Today, India tried to get the better of him via pity. They dropped catches, bowled medium-pace, gave overthrows and looked dejected throughout the day.

“What d’ya make of that, Cooky?” they seemed to be saying. “Feeling guilty?”

Cook punched the ball into the legside and took another single.

Cook doesn’t care. It’s not his job to care. We can see him in 20 years time, playing cricket down the drive with his nine-year-old son. Cook’s batting.

His son gets bored after an hour and starts getting tetchy. Cook punches the ball into the legside and takes another single. A few hours later, his son’s crying and his wife’s pleading with him to go easy on the boy. Cook punches the ball into the legside and takes another single.

As a dad, he’s an arsehole. As an England opening batsman, he’s mint.

Alastair Cook still proving people wrong

No comments as yet on our latest Cricinfo article.

We predict that at least one of the first ten will be about how Alastair Cook isn’t actually all that good and how Virender Sehwag’s better.

The other nine will be asking whether the article is supposed to be funny or not.

England’s one-day opening batsmen might stay the same

For us, this is the biggest positive to have come out of England’s one-day series win against Sri Lanka. In one-day cricket, your opening batsmen are pretty much your most important players and England have rarely had a decent, settled partnership.

The run-up to the last World Cup was pretty typical. Mere weeks away from the event, Steven Davies opened, then Matt Prior, before Kevin Pietersen was given the job after a scissors-paper-stone marathon involving everyone who made it to breakfast at the team hotel one particular morning.

The chopping and changing never seems to end and England rarely start a 50-over match without feeling like they’re two wickets down before a ball is bowled. No starts, slow starts and bad starts – those are the ways in which England start their innings. Cook and Kieswetter haven’t done this.

Who knows, they might actually start to get used to each other. If they make a complete arse of the job against India later in the summer, can we maybe just give them the benefit of the doubt? The abiding suspicion that the grass is greener elsewhere rather overlooks an English one-day opening landscape that is as lush as that bit of the moon where Buzz Aldrin spilt bleach.

Alastair Cook broadens his range

Many of you will say Alastair Cook proved us wrong by hitting 95 off 75 balls against Sri Lanka.

Our point was actually that you shouldn’t open with an anchor in one-day cricket. We say that your sensible batsman, your banker, should come in at three or four.

Wrong pigeonhole?

We kind of assumed that Alastair Cook would always play the anchor role, because up until now, he has. Yet in the fourth one-day international, he didn’t. He played like a proper one-day opener. If he can do that, we’re fine with his opening.

Open, hit the ball, score runs. We’re not against Alastair Cook; we’re against consolidating from the outset.

Playing the situation

Three years ago, we said that Cook would make a one-day cricketer. We said that a batsman who plays according to the situation is a good batsman and just because you only see him in one family of situations (Test cricket) doesn’t mean he doesn’t have it in him to play differently in another environment.

However, most of Cook’s one-day innings thus far have been kind of cloggy. The slog-sweep he brought in seemed like a one-note nod to more expansive cricket. Like a bad husband who brings flowers every week, it had the air of being an apologetic gesture designed to distract from other shortcomings rather than being anything more meaningful.

But this innings was better. We wouldn’t say we’re sold on Cook as a one-day opener, but we’re more impressed with him as a cricketer. He’s broadened his range.

Have we made ‘range’ a thing yet?

Alastair Cook as a one-day opener

Dunno. Give him a chance?

The best players are adaptable, but we can’t shake the feeling that even if Alastair Cook can survive as a one-day batsman, he isn’t an opener.

Batsmen sometimes get branded as being ‘openers’ in England, but one-day opening is different. Successful one-day openers generally come in one of two forms.

Mad flailers

Not crappy pinch-hitters, just talented batsmen who are willing to throw the bat. These guys give you a start and hopefully more, but you know they won’t always succeed and you’re fine with that.

• Virender Sehwag
• Chris Gayle
• Adam Gilchrist
• Sanath Jayasuriya
• Herschelle Gibbs

Utter class

Fine batsmen who often bat in the middle order in Tests. These are the guys who you want around for as long as possible. These are your bankers.

• Sachin Tendulkar
• Mark Waugh
• Hashim Amla
• Gordon Greenidge
• Sourav Ganguly

Alastair Cook doesn’t fit either of those categories, which isn’t to say he can’t play one-day cricket. It’s just that openers are so, so important in that format. If there’s one batting position you want to get right, it’s that one.

Alastair Cook fails to respect the sequence

Cook, Trott, Cook, Trott – we’re just starting to get the hang of writing about the England Test team when Alastair Cook spazzes one straight up in the air on 96. The idiot.

Now what have we got? A load of half stories, that’s what.

• Alastair Cook scores most of a hundred.
• Ian Bell shows resilience. For a bit.
• Eoin Morgan plays as if he’s going to score a hundred, but falls ‘21 runs short’ according to Nick Knight.
• Matt Prior looks fiery, but hasn’t finished.
• Kevin Pietersen gets out for ball-all, but to a quick bowler, not a left-arm spinner.

Rubbish. What are we supposed to make out of that? Even 342-6 isn’t particularly dominant in the modern day. No story there.

The sooner England get bowled out and bring out their trio of ganglatrons, the better. We know where we are then.

England Test captaincy play-off

So Alastair Cook’s an England captain (one-day internationals) and Stuart Broad’s an England captain (Twenty20). But which one will go on to become the REAL England captain – the one who’s in charge of the Test team?

Is this really the way to do it. Is this really the plan now? Auditioning?

Do they both have to captain England before a decision can be made? Couldn’t the selectors have devised a series of competitive events to gauge their skills instead?

We suggest the following:

• Mano a mano coin-tossing
• Handshakefulness evaluation
• Long-range vague arm-waving (against the clock)
• Taking the positives from a shocking defeat oral test

And while we’re on this subject, can we express our grave displeasure at the unrepresentative nature of the current England captains. There are three of them now and they are all public school boys, defiling the air at press conferences with their hideous, grating received pronunciation accents.

We miss Michael Vaughan.

Alastair Cook further extends the time between dismissals against Australia

Alastair Cook is in a Vaughanian run of form down under. When he was batting with Jonathan Trott, it was a case of ‘the bowlers may change, but the batsmen remain the same’.

Was it the Ashes or some sort of Cook-Trott conceptual art? Can you detect the passage of time if there are no landmarks along the way? It’s daytime at night at the moment and whenever you turn on the telly – whatever day, whatever week – there’s Alastair Cook. Time no longer has meaning.

Cook should call his work ‘Australian Purgatory’. We’ve been in worse places.

Australia’s grass-is-greener selection policy could lead to Ryan Harris being replaced by Rolf by the end of the series if this carries on.

Alastair Cook creates a weird scorecard with help from Jonathan Trott

When have you ever seen an England scorecard that read 517-1? Against Australia as well.

We said that Alastair Cook would be okay and with 235 not out, you’d say we were probably right about that. We also predicted a whole host of series results though – none of which featured a draw.

Defending with an angled bat

Previous TV analysis of Alastair Cook has given the wrong impression. It makes you think that he’s destined to fail if he does anything even slightly wrong, but cricket doesn’t really work like that.

Batting in Australia is more about the batsman’s head than his technique, so the players who have made it to international cricket overcoming technical limitations are actually more likely to succeed. It’s counter-intuitive, but if you’re given a pool of international batsmen and asked to identify who’ll do well down under, pick the guys with the worst technique. They’ve got something about them that makes up for those flaws and those strengths will be of greater importance in Australia than elsewhere.

Cook and Trott on scorecards and in highlights

It has to be said that Alastair Cook and Jonathan Trott is the perfect partnership for this tour. We Brits can wake to the fruits of their labours without enduring the detail. Put these two in a highlights package and they’re quite watchable. Or maybe we’re just watching the bowlers’ faces.

Alastair Cook’s footwork and TV analysis

TV analysis can get a bit nit-picking and it turns us all into experts. Alastair Cook was in poor form and there had to be a reason: “His footwork’s not good. Here’s an example of that.” There’s your proof. Case closed.

Only it doesn’t exactly work like that. Technique can improve your chances of succeeding as a batsman, but flaws don’t always mean failure. A batsman can play a shot, a whole innings, or a whole career with dreadful footwork and still be pretty successful.

In Alastair Cook’s case, there was a lot of video footage of him playing duff shots. However, because he was getting out so quickly, all the footage was of the first few balls of each innings. That partly supports the view that poor technique is getting him out, but it’s also true that many of the very best batsman can bat like great fat lumps of dog toss when they first come to the crease.

Technique’s something you can’t think about when you’re batting. Thoughts are a thick gum that clogs your movements and sabotages your timing. What you’re really after is a Zen-like autopilot state.

If you were in a conversation with someone and they used the word ‘verticals‘, you wouldn’t think about hitting them in the face, would you? You’d just do it. That’s the state of mind a batsman needs.