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Restart the clock.
This may have been all of 10 runs more than he made just a handful of Tests ago, but it rewrites a tired script. Suddenly people can’t fall back on ‘hasn’t made a hundred since…’ and so they’re instead forced to look at the facts. Those facts are that Alastair Cook has been scoring quite a lot of runs in Test cricket of late.
Cook knew that the fifties didn’t really count though. He knew their value would only be seen in the light of a three-figure score. The man has more grit than a resurfaced rural road. Having painstakingly worked his way past fifty five times in his previous eight Test innings, he started again from nought. Again he wrung painfully deliberate runs out of this West Indian attack. Again he put the hours in.
He nurdled, worked and occasionally hoicked it to leg; he ignored the ball when it could be ignored; and when he called a team-mate through for a single that was never there, he ensured it was a homicidal single, not a suicidal single. He did everything in his power to ensure he reached three figures and for once, no-one stepped in at the last minute to deny him.
It meant a lot to him. You could tell. He even let fly a huge, bestial roar.
There is little objective difference between a score of 99 and one of 100 unless your match ends up being Edgbaston 2005 tight.
The thing that has bugged me about Alastair Cook’s horrendous run of form it that for the longest time he was not the player who scored hundred but that he scored big, daddy and granddaddy hundreds.
While getting out for 105 is hardly the way to go about scoring a daddy hundred, given all the bullshit that’s been written of him recently one could no-more stay cross at him than one could at Ben Stokes: a man to whom I am increasingly and distressingly become attracted. I think it’s that profile of his and those tatoos, he’s soon to usurp Chris Hemsworth if he continues in this manner.
This is good. This is the first step to rehabilitating Cook and the England team.
Cook needs to take a look at the situation when he was scoring runs by the bucketload, and compare this to the situation recently when he was scoring runs by the small, almost invisible bucketload. This will include things like not being captain and having a teammate you despise.
Well done Cooky. Next step: win the match.
I’m glad you mentioned the bestial roar, KC.
Daisy remarked upon it the moment after Cook scored the milestone run and let forth that sound.
I didn’t expect much from Shai Hope on this track…
…indeed a victory of expectation over Hope just now!
Good test match this. England’s (and Cook’s) score is being improved ball by ball by Anderson and Broad at the moment.
Well, not so much Broad.
He’s been unlucky, one dropped catch and several past the edge. Prevents the batsmen from relaxing when Anderson isn’t bowling.
5-4-2-3 for jimmy at the moment. He’s not bad, is he.
Livid that we haven’t yet cloned him.
If we cloned him, the selection process would become impossible. Jimmy 1 is an immediate pick, so because Jimmies 2 to 11 are identical by definition, they must also be immediate picks. Hence a team full of Jimmies, and a typical innings score of 17 all out.
Also, how would the coach pick a nightwatchman?
A lot of eggs in the Jimmy Anderson basket in that line-up though. Is there any way of making left-handed Jimmies?
We were thinking more of subsequent Jimmies, like the gholas of Duncan Idaho in Dune.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duncan_Idaho
Would they remember which team they were playing for though? As gholas, I can’t see anything stopping CA from controlling a few, with disastrous consequences.
Bert raises a good point about the vagaries of ghola production / management.
I’m more for fusing Anderson’s skin with sand trout, which should both prolong his career a few centuries and ensure a smooth transition to retired life as undying global god-tyrant.
Just to mention that Cook’s impressive run of test centuries has come to an end – again