Comfort often arrives in unexpected places. The last two years of Alastair Cook’s time as England captain were fretful at times, marked by scratchiness, defeats and some elbow-gnawing press conferences, an understandable sense of basic human metal fatigue at the prospect of being forced to communicate yet again in a series of terse, angsty soundbites in front of a board covered with adverts.
Cook is a good man and a wonderful cricketer but his manner has perhaps chimed with something a little alienating, a sense that here is a child entirely of the ECB bubble, every one of those 11,000 Test runs scored in entitled isolation, poster boy for his sport’s retreat behind the veil. Famously a piece of in-house marketing found that more British schoolchildren could identify John Cena, the pinheaded American wrestle-actor, than the captain of the England cricket team. How we laughed. But it is also a little sad.
Through this Cook has been revered, admired and enjoyed. During those mid-career years when he seemed able simply to bat for ever, the last beefeater on parade while all around him keeled over, he was celebrated as a kind of sweat-free fixed-gear ubermensch. As the tide retreats further on Test cricket, starting with an oddly diffuse start to the Test summer on Thursday against South Africa, it may be the gift of late Cook to be loved a little too.
But then, let’s face it, we need all the comfort we can get right now. In broad terms, the summer of 2017 has been pretty much a constant fug of horror and confusion, an experience best compared to being strapped inside a small European hatchback car as it tumbles head over heels down an alpine cliff face towards a lake of boiling piss, while vomiting repeatedly into a sealed full-face scuba mask.
Set against this disintegration it seems fitting that dear old cobwebbed Test cricket should come creaking in from the wings. Has there been a less heralded, more fogged and messy start to a major Test summer? Let’s face it, Test cricket itself is a mess, with even the winter’s Ashes threatened by unrest. England’s top order is a mess. South Africa are a mess, a compromise squad depleted by age and alternative economic opportunities, not least county cricket, which is home to 58 current and past South Africans, or three times as many as the touring party.
Against this shifting landscape one man has come striding through the smoke and fallout dust. There are still doubts over how much Test fire Cook has left. Five hundreds in the past four years looks like evidence of sustained decline, a top-order giant scaled back into a scorer of useful runs, the odd daddy-fifty, curtailed by a growing weariness.
Or perhaps not. For Cook this has been a rare golden summer, with six hundreds in all formats and a strong suggestion that Cook 3.0 may just be ripe for a Gooch-like late career surge.
He certainly deserves a little love at the end of 11 gruelling years with England. Watching Cook bat, even on his awkward, dogged days, is the best kind of low-rev pleasure. Not only for the craft of his defence, the peculiar grace of a great opening batsman, an art based around restraint and stillness, the ability to exist simply as a point of resistance. Cook is also a beautifully severe batsman in Tests, source of his own slow-burn staccato violence.
Some Test match indulgence at this point. There are times when it feels like the best shot in cricket: the check-drive hard-run three through a vacant mid-on at 11.45am on a grey English Thursday morning, 20 minutes since the last run with the ball nibbling and ducking, and skies closing in, stands hushed by the sound of 20,000 people afraid to shift or blink – all of that pierced suddenly in a shared groan of release as the ball is sent bobbling off towards the pavilion, short leg in shinpad-flapping pursuit, with a feeling in that second of the weather shifting, pressure lanced, a day, a summer, an unspoken private-public drama edging slightly one way.
Obviously planking it repeatedly over midwicket on a late-summer road to the strains of That’s The Way I Like It by KC And The Sunshine Band is also good if you like that sort of thing.
It has been said that Cook has built a great career out of only three shots. But this is unfair. He has at least four shots. The short-arm back cut. The flick off the pads. That pull shot, where suddenly he is brandishing the bat with a startling sense of freedom like a man expertly hurling the hotel mini-fridge out of his 17th-floor window. Best of all he has an excellent leave. Not a fancy, bat-twirling leave, more a pointed kind of stillness, the most English of shots in a country where silence, the refusal to engage or acknowledge, is often the most devastating weapon.
The point is that Cook embodies more than any player in world cricket, perhaps more than anyone to come, those other virtues: the difficult pleasures of the most achingly complex global sport devised, a stately physical art-form that is, for all its past glories, in decline.
At his worst he can look like a man confused by the basic mechanics of standing up straight. At his best there is something glacial about Cook’s batting, the quiet resolution of hours of stealthy growth, like an ice-shelf slowly rising just above the horizon
And without him, what have we got left? Look down the list of runs scored among those still active. Cook is up there foraging away in 10th on 11,057. Next up, but miles back and 34 years old, is Hashim Amla. Further back still is Ross Taylor on six thousand, then David Warner. The game has changed. No one will get up there again. Cook is the last marker out there, a man still doggedly doing the marathon, rounding the Tower of London in his clanking Victorian diving suit.
Like pretty much everything else, the only problem Test cricket really has is when people stop caring. For the first time it is possible to feel it here too, a sense of something glazed and forgetful about the late-dawning of the Test summer. Test cricket will return on Thursday with a reassuring warmth, a full house, the old rituals played out. The Lord’s bell tolling. At some stage Cook will trudge out to open the batting in his 141st Test. But he remains a rare point of stillness, perhaps the last great pure Test player, our own Major Tom out there floating around in his tin can while down below the world turns out of sight.
