When Alastair Cook started at Bedford School, his father bought him a copy of Mike Brearley’s book The Art of Captaincy. A decade later, Cook admitted that he had never read actually got round to reading it. In the autobiography Cook published when he was 24 – he was as precocious in this regard as every other – he explained that as a kid all he cared about was batting, “and I did not want anything getting in the way of it”. If some men are born to the captaincy, and others achieve it, Cook assumed it. It was a corollary of his batting. In the end he led England in 59 Tests, more than any other man in history, but he never seems to have seen captaincy as an art, more a duty. “It interests me,” he wrote, “but it doesn’t drive me.”
The England and Wales Cricket Board eventually arranged for Cook to meet Brearley in 2007. They chatted for three hours, and when they were done Cook decided: “You can take as much advice as possible and talk to as many people as you can but at the end of the day you have to do things your way.” And his way was to take this complicated job and make it as simple as possible, just as he had stripped the act of batting down to three shots: a pull, a cut and a nudge. Another Essex captain, Doug Insole, said that the role was one of “a public relations officer, agricultural consultant, psychiatrist, accountant, nursemaid and diplomat”. Cook decided the most important thing to be was a batsman.
When Cook was picked to lead England’s Under-19 team in the 2004 World Cup, he decided: “My efforts would be better directed towards trying to get runs for the team, than trying to be a young Mike Brearley.” And he finished as England’s leading run scorer. Likewise, when he led the MCC against Sussex in 2007: “I wasn’t trying to impress with any particularly innovative or unusual decisions. The biggest thing for me was that I batted for five hours in the first innings for 142.” Cook decided to play to his strengths, and by doing so he turned them into his limitations.
In 2010, Cook became captain regent when Andrew Strauss was persuaded to skip the tour to Bangladesh. In his very first innings Cook made what was his best Test score yet, 173. But he decided not to enforce the follow-on, though his team had a lead of 303. In the second Test he scored another ton, 109 this time. But in the field he set five men on the boundary inside the first hour of the match, as Tamim Iqbal whacked England’s attack all over. The next year’s Wisden included the tart remark that his “reputation as a future England captain had been bestowed upon him too easily for comfort”.
Another Essex man, Keith Fletcher, would sometimes tell his team: “I’m batting at No4 and the rest of you can sort yourselves out.” At first, Cook’s captaincy sometimes seemed to be little more than an announcement that he would bat all day and then leave everyone else to do their own thing. He trusted his senior bowlers – James Anderson (who had wanted the captaincy himself), Stuart Broad and Graeme Swann – to devise tactics and set fields. And for a time, when he was leading an experienced team, it was a brilliantly successful strategy, especially in India in 2012, on his first tour as the full-time captain.
In their first innings of that series, England were dismissed for 191 and made to follow-on, a performance that triggered flashbacks to their rout in the UAE 10 months earlier. Second time around, Cook batted nine hours for 176, as if he wanted to prove to both his own team and the opposition that it was possible for an Englishman to stay in on a spinning pitch. It was, Graham Gooch said, “as good an innings as I’ve ever seen him play”. He followed it with a second century in the second Test at Mumbai, and a third in the third at Kolkata. Altogether, Cook ran up 506 runs in over 24 hours of batting.
England flowered in the ground he ploughed. Kevin Pietersen, brought back into the team at the start of the tour, scored 186 in Mumbai, while Jonathan Trott and Ian Bell both made centuries in Nagpur. Swann, Anderson and Monty Panesar swept up Indian wickets, and England won a series in India for the first time in 28 years. It was one of the great English victories and Cook’s finest achievement as captain. But it took an enormous amount out of him and his team, and in New Zealand that spring they fought their way to a tired draw, an omen for their back-to-back series against Australia later in 2013.
Australia were in disarray that summer, and if Cook often looked to be a less imaginative leader than Michael Clarke, England did not need him to be particularly witty, wise or aggressive to win. Cook’s own form was poor, but his senior players delivered for him. Ian Bell scored centuries in the three Tests England won; Anderson and Broad took 10-wicket hauls, while Swann captured 26 in the series. But England’s cricket took on an ugly temper. Wisden described their “taciturn leadership, unsentimental proficiency, and insouciant gamesmanship”. Then late that night at the Oval several players were caught urinating on the cricket pitch. None of which seemed in key with Cook’s own character.
With hindsight it is clear that Cook did not have a strong grip on that team. And in Australia three months later, it all fell apart. England, unbeaten in 13 consecutive Tests, lost five in a row, and three senior players – Swann, Trott and Pietersen – along with them. Cook, of course, was in the room for the infamous meeting between Pietersen and the ECB’s then managing director, Paul Downton, and chief selector, James Whitaker. Pietersen remembered Cook staring at his shoes, refusing to speak, and damned him as a “company man” in the bitter book he released in October 2014. Cook kept his own counsel. And the ECB backed his captaincy, but let him shoulder the blame too.
The rift split English cricket. Mike Atherton, who endured the ball-tampering scandal in 1994, reckoned that 2014 was “one of the most tumultuous an England captain can ever have experienced”, that “the intensity and the personal nature of the criticism” Cook received had never been exceeded. It almost broke him. He wanted to quit after England’s hamfisted defeat by Sri Lanka at Headingley, but was talked into staying on for another loss at Lord’s, where England were outplayed by India on a wicket seemingly tailor-made to their advantage. At the Rose Bowl an innings of 95, and a standing ovation, gave succour, and sustained him to the end of the summer.
That winter Cook was stripped of the ODI captaincy. In his anger, his stubborn self-belief seemed to verge on self-delusion. He was blind to the way in which the ODI game had moved on, and also that in trying to adapt to it he had compromised his Test-match batting. Well-rested, he returned to the team for a tour of the West Indies and scored 105 in Bridgetown, his first Test century in two years. This was the beginning of the third act of Cook’s captaincy. He was in charge of a young team, one that needed leading, and soon working with coaches, in Paul Farbrace and Trevor Bayliss, who were happy to let him have control.
There were more monumental innings, 162 against New Zealand in the spring, 263 against Pakistan in the autumn. And in between, another Ashes series. This time he did outmanoeuvre Clarke. There were little things that told how he had changed. At Cardiff, he put a helmet on Joe Root and set him as a short third slip, and at Trent Bridge he declared when England were only nine down, simply to allow his bowlers three overs before lunch. He finished the summer as one of three Englishmen to lead his team to victory in two home Ashes series, along with Brearley and WG Grace.
Since then, Cook’s form has been as inconsistent as his team’s. He has seemed distracted, spent. Since the first day of his captaincy in November 2012, Cook has played more matches, 57, batted in more innings, 107, faced more balls, 9,905 and been at the crease for more minutes, 13,697 than any other player in the world. He has led his team through 16 series in seven different countries, been fired, traduced and abused, seen his friends quit and his coaches sacked, been battered by fast bowlers and befuddled by slow ones. And he has come through it, exhausted, but unbroken. English cricket has had better captains, but never a better servant.
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