COOK’S RECORD PROVES THAT UGLY LEFTIES CAN FLOURISH

EVER the aesthete, Ted Dexter once reckoned that he would have loved to have batted left-handed. “They cannot be anything other than elegant,” he once mused while chairman of selectors, playing an imaginary cover drive the southpaw way with his golf brolly to emphasise the point.

I was pondering this the other day as I watched Alastair Cook grind out 69 against South Africa at Lord’s in England’s second innings. A recordbreaking left-hander, not even Cook’s mum would claim he was elegant. Nor would old Ma Elgar, whose son Dean opens the innings for South Africa. And, as for Keaton Jennings and Gary Ballance, you couldn’t get get them to be graceful if you dressed them in tutus.

So what has happened to Dexter’s conjecture which was no doubt borne of such thrilling lefties as Garry Sobers, Brian Lara and David Gower? Well, Moeen Ali still flies the flag for the filigree stroke-maker among them but I suspect a hard-nosed pragmatism has taken hold of the others.

For all their grace, lefties often got a bad press for the insouciant ways they got out, the airy waft outside off stump being a particular bugbear of critics and commentators. As Gower always maintained:“Cream one of those shots through the covers for four and you are a genius; nick it behind and you are a cretin.”

All Cook and Co have done is to cut out that risk-reward trade-off. It might be boring for the likes of Dexter and those who watch cricket to see sumptuous strokes ease off the bat like rain off a car bonnet. But 11,129 runs at 46.8 with 30 hundreds, Cook’s Test record to date, proves that ugly lefties can prosper with the best of them.