The dominant figure in the Ashes has been someone who I didn’t even mention in my series preview: England opener Alastair Cook (not to be confused with his near-namesake Alistair Cook). He’s never been a flashy player. He was on the verge of being dropped this summer against Pakistan. And here’s what he’s done so far in this Ashes series.
- Score 438 runs. That is a lot of runs. In 2002-3 Michael Vaughan scored 633 runs, widely hailed as one of of the greatest performances by a visiting batsman in Australia. Cook is already within 200 runs of that, and that’s after only batting three times.
- Got out once. Thus far, his scores for the series look like this: 67, 235 not out, 136 not out. This means that he’s averaging a cool 438 runs per dismissal in this series. We should all be so lucky. Note that that 136 not out could increase considerably on day 3 of the current Test – England would love to bat for the better part of the day, and Cook would love to be there the whole time.
- Face 842 balls. A big part of being a successful Test batsman is just hanging around at the crease for a long time. The longer you stick around –> more balls for the bowlers to bowl –> tired bowlers.
- Bat for almost three days without getting out. Back in July, I wrote that “Cricket rewards consistency and concentration, the ability to toil and grind your way along to victory.” Victory is hardly assured for England at this point, but if they do win this match, it’ll be in large part due to Cook’s ability to grind away.
I’ll leave the state-of-the-match analysis to Becca.
Ok, I know this was totally not the point of your post, but you've just suddenly reminded me of Monsterpiece Theater, with Alistair Cookie-Monster.
ReplyDeleteThanks for that. :-)
Nothing wrong with that. My basic method here is to be as allusive as possible and hope some of it sticks!
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