When the 10th wicket fell, almost no one moved at all. There was a cheer, of course, and a rustle as people got up, the clack of all those seat backs snapping shut, but nobody made for the gangways. It was the innings break, a 10-minute stretch, but it seemed no one wanted to fetch another cuppa or a fresh pint, that everyone who needed a pee decided they could hold on just the one moment longer. Instead they all turned to face the Bedser Stand, fixed their eyes on the spot at the top of the steps that lead from the England dressing room down to the pitch, where, just after 3pm, Alastair Cook appeared, ready to open the batting for his country one final time.
It was a warm day, the kind one might have conjured for oneself in a daydream about one’s last Test: a lick of breeze, a little white cloud, and lashings of late-summer sun. Until Cook stepped out. Then the rain started, or what sounded like it – a hailstorm of applause, echoing round the stands, as 25,000 people came together in one long standing ovation that carried on until Cook had made it to the crease and marked his guard. In the end it was only the start of play that stopped it, the last claps cut out just as the umpire dropped his arm and Jasprit Bumrah ran in for the first time.
Cook set himself in the familiar old style: three taps on his toe, a waggle in the backlift, that odd little hitch of his, in which he swings the bat down and up and down again. That first ball almost finished him. It slipped in on a leg-stump line and hit him high up on the thigh, he flapped at it, spread his arms in alarm as it fell down by his feet. People clapped in relief when he landed his bat on the next ball and blocked it out to midwicket. Goodness, but it was a nervous start to his last innings. His wife, who is heavily pregnant, must have been covering her eyes.
After 20 minutes Ishant Sharma finally bowled Cook one he could hit. It drifted towards his hip and he popped it through square-leg for four as though he was swatting off an insistent wasp. He has always had that stroke. Back when the two of them were playing together at Essex, long before one became England’s captain and the other England’s coach, Andy Flower said Cook played the ball off his legs better than any other batsman he had seen. It came naturally to him, even as a teenager. All these years later it is still the sweetest, smoothest shot of the few he has.
But Cook’s real talent, of course, is less to do with his ability to put bad balls away to the fence and more to do with his ability to put bad shots out of mind. His great gifts – concentration, character and temperament – might not be as highly prized as some other attributes in this game but they have served him, and his team, as well as any. And he needed to use them as Mohammed Shami entered the battle. In this match Shami has been bowling with such speed and such skill for so little reward. Before tea he beat Cook three times in a row with balls that came at him like 85mph off-breaks.
A similar delivery did for Keaton Jennings, when he was suckered into thinking he could leave it alone. But Cook plodded on, stuck in gridlock, his score stalled on 13 for a 10-over stretch after tea. Ravindra Jadeja had him in all sorts of trouble, too: he almost made him play on and nearly had him caught at leg-slip off the very next ball. Cook was poking and prodding and swinging and missing, beaten inside and out over and over again. There were agonised shouts from the crowd now and anxious gasps. Cook, obstinate as he is, persisted, apparently unruffled by any of it.
He could have been out to any of a dozen different deliveries in the 125 he faced but, somehow, the dangerous balls never struck. One might call it divine luck, if he had not worked so hard and for so long to earn it. It felt as if all that goodwill was protecting his edge.
In among the swishes and misses he started to play his shots – a cut, a poke, even; once, a lesser‑spotted on-drive. So his score rolled inexorably on, up past 20, 30 and 40. He was 46 not out at stumps, which means he has already made more than 100 runs in his last Test. There are not many great batsmen who have done that for England. Endings tend to be anticlimactic, because they come when the game’s gone – the eyes a little less sharp, the reflexes a little less smart, the hunger that much more dull.
Fewer still have done it in a match England won. Nasser Hussain was one, Douglas Jardine and Maurice Leyland were two others. Cook will not be happy unless he joins them on that shortlist. The win is the thing. He wants one more to finish. But whatever happens, whether he gets it or not, there will be another couple of ovations for him yet.
