Alastair Cook retirement: The end of an era for English cricket

Neville Cardus once proposed a test. Suppose you were in London and heard that a certain batsman was 20 not out at lunch, would you summon a taxi and head for the ground? It’s a good question. Cardus posed it in an article about Tom Graveney who of course passed the test. I’m not sure that Ken Barrington would have; yet the record shows that Barrington was the greatest – or, if you prefer, the most valuable –  Test match batsman of his generation, one that, besides Graveney, included Peter May, Colin Cowdrey and Ted Dexter, all of whom would surely have passed the Cardus Test.

Alastair Cook probably wouldn’t have done so, and not only because you wouldn’t have felt the need to hail a taxi. You could have queued for a bus and got to Lord’s or The Oval sure that Cook would still be batting and now perhaps 35 or 40 not out. Kevin Pieterson would have had many flagging that taxi down; Ian Bell would have had me doing so, as would Joe Root now. But not Cook; and yet Cook has been the greatest English Test match batsman of his time. It’s not just that he has scored more runs than anyone else; it’s that more often than not he has scored them when they mattered most.

This summer should have convinced anyone that opening the innings is the hardest job in cricket and that it’s much easier to make runs when you bat lower in the order. Only five players have made more Test match runs that Alastair Cook, none of them an opener. Likewise, there are few opening batsmen in the list of players who finish their Test career with an average over 50 and two of the openers there, Jack Hobbs and Herbert Sutcliffe, played a very long time ago. An average of around 45 is pretty good for an opener: it puts Alastair Cook alongside Geoffrey Boycott and John Edrich and a little ahead of Graham Gooch and Michael Atherton.

Neville Cardus was dead long before Alastair Cook first picked up a bat, but much of what he wrote about Herbert Sutcliffe might be applied to Cook. What impressed him most about Sutcliffe was his imperturbability.  Nothing ruffled him. He might play and miss three times in an over. A ball might skim over the bails. He might be dropped in the slips. At the end of the over he would lean on his bat, legs crossed, and survey the scene calmly. He was still there. There was nothing to worry about and there was no point thinking about what had happened or might have happened. Cook was like that. During the American Civil War, a soldier in the Union army said of his commander-in-chief, Ulysses S Grant: “Ulysses doesn’t scare worth a damn”. You might say the same about Alastair Cook: he didn’t scare worth a damn.

He has never been the prettiest or most stylish of batsmen. Though his range of shots, when he was in form, was a bit wider than his critics would admit, there was always something stiff, even wooden, in his batting. He didn’t flow into the stroke. This perhaps accounted for what I always thought a weakness in his game, his inability so often to keep the score ticking over by pushing the ball into a gap for a quick single. Though he scored a lot of runs on the offside, there was little of the elegance one associates with left-handers. For elegance indeed he can’t compare to Moeen Ali or young Sam Curran. Nobody ever spoke or wrote of Alastair Cook’s “languid grace” as they did when remembering David Gower or Gary Sobers.

Batsmen are dismissed more often because they have made an error of judgement rather than because of anything the bowler has done. Cook made fewer such errors than most. Throughout his career he has been the best advertisement for the old adage: “stay at the wicket and the runs will come”. Once he was settled he must have been infuriating to bowl at. There were many days, long days, when the bowlers must have felt that no matter what they tried, they weren’t going to get him out. This wasn’t on account of the sort of virtuosity which had one great bowler say of Ranjitsinhji: “I puts the ball where I wants and he puts it where he bleeding well chooses”. On the contrary, it was rather that Cook achieved an unusual degree of moral ascendancy. He didn’t destroy attacks; he wore them down. He caused bowlers to abandon hope. Like all openers he has often been out early and cheaply, but, for most of his career, once he has dug himself in, he has been well nigh immovable.  He has blunted many attacks to the benefit of lower order batsmen.

The good news is that he intends to continue playing for Essex, and has indeed signed a new three-year contract. I have a lot of time for players who don’t regard the end of their Test career as the end of their career in first-class cricket, players like Marcus Trescothick, Mark Ramprakash, Paul Collingwood, Jonathan Trott and Ian Bell, while conversely taking a dim view of those like Nasser Hussein, Michael Vaughan and Andrew Strauss who, without the excuse of injury, selfishly retire from the county game as soon as they leave the Test match arena. Those who soldier on for their counties offer an invaluable service. Their experience helps young players, and they have the opportunity to give something back to the county which nurtured them when they were young, but which has mostly been deprived of their help throughout their Test career. They even may be said to owe something to their county’s loyal members.

The county game needs such players, needs the Collingwoods, Bells and Cooks. It has been cynically devalued by the ECB, with almost no championship matches played during the high summer months. In the long run, this will harm English cricket – indeed it may already be doing so. Ian Bell said this week that the present structure makes it unlikely that counties will look to develop batsmen like Alastair Cook – the worse for English cricket if this is indeed the case.

Alastair Cook has done as much for English cricket as any player of the last twenty years. Now, having honourably opted out of the Test game, he may still have two services to perform. The first is to contribute by his performance and example to the maintenance and indeed the raising of the standard of the County Championship. The second is surely to persuade his old batting partner Andrew Strauss that the ECB should change direction and seek to strengthen that championship instead of apparently being content to weaken it. That Cook has had thirteen opening partners since Strauss’s retirement is a clear indication that the present schedule of the English cricket season is damaging, rather than benefitting, the England Test side.