If anyone was capable of signing off with a big hundred after a difficult summer, it was Alastair Cook. After the week he’s had, with all the emotion and all the interviews he’s had to do, to be able to dig deep once more speaks volumes for the man.
He said before this game that he felt he had always squeezed every last drop out of his ability and that’s exactly what he would have wanted to do here. Sometimes in your last game, you have the attitude that what will be will be.
But Cook’s not that sort of lad. He would not have wanted to say goodbye without giving his absolute all. It was a fitting farewell for a legend of the game.
I’ve never seen an ovation like the one that greeted Cook’s hundred — we’ve seen several ovations in this game alone!
It said a lot for his popularity in this country, not just for the runs he’s scored but for the dignity he’s brought to the game.
What also struck me was the warmth of the reaction of his team-mates. Leading the applause from the dressing room balcony was his old mate Jimmy Anderson. Sometimes you can go through the motions when you’re applauding a team-mate, but this was totally genuine. They know how much they’re going to miss him when he’s gone. Some people will say he should reconsider his decision to retire and go to Sri Lanka to help England on the turning tracks they’re going to face out there. But it was never really a question of whether Cook was still capable of scoring runs. It was about his appetite, and he said himself he didn’t have that edge any more.
He’s said in the past that when he’s batting at the other end from a team-mate, he can’t believe how easily batting comes to a guy like Joe Root. Despite all his runs, batting has never come that easily to Cook. Scoring nearly 12,500 Test runs has taken it out of him. He knows his race is run.
In any case, I think it’s always better to leave people wanting a bit more. That’s what they’ll say about Cook now, and it’s a great way to go out.
In some ways, knowing that a game or innings is going to be your last can be liberating. I know it was for me after I told our coach Duncan Fletcher before the second innings against New Zealand at Lord’s in 2004 that I was packing it in.
I was hoping he’d say, “No, we need you”, but when he didn’t I decided I was going to enjoy the day and smell the roses.
It would be my last innings in an England shirt and I was going to take it all in. I was lucky enough to get a hundred. But no one else knew it was my last innings, unlike Cook.
How he managed to put all that expectation to the back of his mind, when he knew that everyone turning up to the Oval wanted him to convert his overnight 46 into another Test hundred is remarkable.
Just as remarkable was the fact that he did it after the summer he’s had, with the Dukes ball swinging and seaming all over the place. He showed that the moment conditions swung in his favour, he was tough enough to compile a score.
He managed to unfrazzle his mind. And that may just be the biggest lesson some of these England batsmen can learn from Alastair Cook.
Alastair Cook leaves the Oval ground after playing his last Test yesterday.
