Cook running out of recipes for success
THE cricketing obituary of Alastair Cook has been written so often that rumours of his demise inevitably sound exaggerated.
Still, a crossroads is approaching — and everyone in English cricket knows it. Joe Root sprang to Cook’s defence after India won the third Test at Trent Bridge, as any decent captain would.
But the truth is that 33-year-old Cook, England’s most prolific Test runscorer, has two matches — perhaps only one, depending on the arrival date of his third child — to convince the selectors and himself that strapping on his pads to face the new ball is what he wants to do this winter and beyond.
Australia arrive next summer, and England’s top- order batsmen will need their wits about them to repel Mitchell Starc, Josh hazlewood and Pat Cummins.
That leaves national selector Ed Smith with a ticklish decision. Stick with Cook through a winter when the slow pitches of Sri Lanka and the Caribbean should favour his game.
Or twist after the series against India, and give yet another new opener — probably Surrey’s Rory Burns, who will be 28 on Sunday — the chance to find his feet before the Ashes. Cook’s dressing-room stock could hardly be higher. he is still popular, affable and unwilling to indulge in excuses about the perils of opening the batting on lively English pitches. he is also the kindly uncle in the Test team — forever telling youngsters not to go hard outside off stump. Cook has scored 12,225 Test runs, for goodness sake. We will not see his like again.
But Smith has already shown he can be ruthless and he knows the numbers are starting to stack up unfavourably.
In 25 Test innings since he made an impressive 243 against West Indies at Edgbaston last summer, Cook has scored 657 at an average of 27.
Even that is heavily dependent on one knock — an unbeaten 244 at Melbourne. Take that out, and he averages 16. And in 17 of the 25 innings, he has failed to reach 20.
If anyone else had returned those figures, they would have joined, Mark Stoneman and Dawid Malan on the growing scrapheap of England batsmen deemed short of the highest class.
But Cook’s facility for scoring runs when he most needs them has always been a sign of the mental strength England value so highly.
Root believes he has the passion to continue until the Ashes. ‘I do, yes, but ultimately you’d have to speak to him about that,’ he said.
‘You never really know what someone is thinking, but you watch him in training — it doesn’t look like someone who is thinking about jacking it in.’
Cook’s hunger will be part of the equation but so will the problem of the bloke at the other end. Six years after Andrew Strauss retired, England are no closer to replacing him, despite trying 12 different openers.
Worryingly, Keaton Jennings is now on his second stint, and showing little sign he learned from his first. So if Cook calls it a day at the end of this series, England would be reliant on Jennings succeeding this winter.
The alternative — to lose two openers in one go — would be very hard to deal with. Cook is 34 in December. But his mentor, Graham Gooch, made over 4,500 Test runs after the age of 35, so all is not lost.
So, Cook’s task, if he fancies it, will be to take the decision out of Smith’s hands. It may well be his greatest challenge yet.