Win or lose, Cook will be a legend
IT was written by Robert Towne, so it’s one hell of line. ‘Course I’m respectable,’ says the despicable Noah Cross in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown. ‘I’m old. Politicians, ugly buildings and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.’
Sport is different. Hang in there and see your reputation trashed. Steven Gerrard’s fatal slip, Tiger Woods missed cuts, the agony of those seven goals against Phil Scolari’s Brazil, Martin Johnson’s ill-fated World Cup as England coach, Ricky Hatton.
Talking with Moeen Ali before this Ashes series, he made a valid point about England’s maligned cricketers. ‘You forget that these guys — Alastair Cook, Stuart Broad, Ian Bell, Jimmy Anderson — they are going to be remembered as legends,’ he said. ‘The way people talk about them, the way the media talk about them, sometimes they forget that.’
And he’s right, of course. There is a reasonable chance England will lose this Ashes series. Probably not crushed, as they were two winters ago, but Australia are a good side and England are inconsistent. They played some excellent stuff against New Zealand, but some rubbish too.
It is impossible to predict which England will turn up right now. They could give Australia a run this summer, they may win, they might be swept aside. And if they are, the criticism will be unrelenting.
It is 14 years since England lost a home Ashes series. Back then, we had forgotten what the urn looked like. It was the seventh in an Australian run of eight straight series wins, equalling England’s record from Victorian times.
The reason defeat this summer would be so hard to take is because we have subsequently experienced significant victories, many due to the players mentioned by Ali, the same ones often castigated as weak, poor, or fading. Bell was in on the ground floor as part of the England team that changed the narrative, reclaiming the Ashes in 2005. Anderson made that squad.
Ali, meanwhile, has known Cook since they played together for England’s Under 19 team. He described him as, mentally, one of the toughest people he had met. He said what impressed him about Cook was his attitude to getting out. He didn’t let it bleed into his game, or the mentality of the team. He would never get too down, he would never pass a bad mood around. Maybe that’s how someone becomes the first English batsman to reach 9,000 runs.
Yet we all know what Cook is. He’s a lousy captain. If England lose to Australia, a strand of the narrative will undoubtedly concern Cook’s failure to match Michael Clarke’s funky leadership. Yet if he wins — and it is a big if, of course — he will be only the third Englishman to triumph in two home Ashes series. WG Grace and Mike Brearley are the others; so he can’t be a mug.
That is the problem with true greatness. It demands longevity, making it vulnerable to age, the emergence of a powerful rival and, in team sports, the loss of valued colleagues.
Ricky Ponting is the only Australian captain to have overseen three Ashes defeats. Yet, undoubtedly, he is one of the greatest players his country has produced. He scored 13,378 Test runs at an average of over 50. He has 2,204 more runs than his nearest rival Allan Border, and nine centuries on Steve Waugh. He just ran out of good teams to lead. It happens. Yet Ponting is, without doubt, a legend. Just like Cook, just like Anderson — now England’s leading wicket-taker — just like most of the senior players in an England team with its reputation on the line. It doesn’t compel us to ignore a waft outside off stump, or a spell of short-pitched rubbish. But after the blood-letting that followed the last Ashes defeat, we perhaps need to put it in context.
These players are not all clowns or under-achievers. The reason we expect so much is that they dragged English cricket back from the wilderness.