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Alastair 'The Chef' Cook: cricket's culinary artist with an old school blend

Roar Rookie
14th September, 2018
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Roar Rookie
14th September, 2018
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A felicitous haul of plaudits embraced the air at The Oval as Alastair Cook, England’s highest ever run scorer in the pinnacle format of our loving game, took the final walk back to the pavilion.

That long walk from the ever so familiar strip of 22 yards, replete with a thousand memories stretched across a span of twelve years is sure to have evoked a few wet eyes in the house. For cricket’s beloved ‘chef’ will no longer gladden its purists with his textbook straight drives, caressed square cuts or his luscious pulls.

Cook had started making a name for himself in junior cricket at just 11 years old when he scored 64 on debut for the Maldon Cricket Club in Essex, a club he still holds close to his heart. But his talent couldn’t really get the push it deserved as his junior school didn’t have much cricket.

What actually cooked the elixir to Cook’s rapid rise up the ranks is sure to raise a few eyebrows here. It was not his talent in cricket or anything anyone’s likely to make a guess on.

It was rather his flair in music! You’ve read it right. It was his knack in music that earned him a scholarship, paving the way for his move to Bedford school. It was here in this school where Cook impressed his cricket master Jeremy Farrell, marking his first step to becoming a Test colossus.

“Cook came to the (Bedford) school the summer before he joined. He was a tiny little boy. You would have seen the pictures of him as a quiet boy and yet he just had this desire to learn and the determination to better himself and that just really impressed us”, Farrell said.

England's Alastair Cook celebrates

(Nick Potts/PA Wire.)

Its safe to say the seeds of Alastair’s trademark play was sown early in his school cricket days. Not being gifted with the ability to start off an innings ended up being a blessing in disguise for the Englishman as it helped him develop his backfoot play characterised by using the pace of the bowlers to deflect and nudge the ball to gaps with a heightened sense of subtlety.

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Fast forward to his international debut in 2006. On the back of earning the accolade of England’s Young Cricketer of the Year following some epic performances in the county game in the summer of 2005, he was called in all the way from Antigua where he was assigned to represent the England Lions.

Be it the 21 hour long flight, the associated jet lag or the absolute lack of sleep jostled with the sheer nerves of playing your first Test match for your country, nothing could come between Alastair Cook. He went crawling out there on a rank Indian turner, scoring a gutsy 60 in the first innings and an extravagant century in the second.

The feat saw him become only the fifth Englishman to score both a ton and half-century in a debut Test. But what’s a much less known feat is that he played his 161 Test matches in only two stretches.

The first one lasting for a meagre two Tests as he had to pull out of the third Test of that series due to a stomach bug. The second lasting a 159 games, six more than Allan Border. That is the longest streak in the nearly two hundred years’ history of the game.

En route to amassing 12,472 runs, 33 centuries, 57 half centuries, he became England’s all-time leading run scorer back in May 2015, surpassing Graham Gooch’s 20-year-old record of 8,900 runs. If that isn’t enough to get you to applause the genius of this once in a generation player, here are some more laurels you might have missed out on.

Cook boasts the record of being the youngest cricketer to reach the cherished milestones of 6000, 7000, 8000, 9000, 10000 and 11000 runs in Test cricket. He is all in all England’s most capped player, longest serving captain, and has the highest number of centuries. Top that off with four Ashes wins, two as captain, as well as series wins in India and South Africa as skipper.

Throughout his ostentatious career, Cook has scored remarkably everywhere he packed his kitbag to. In an age where most English batsmen evidently struggle in either Australia or Asia in particular, the former England opener broke the shackles and registered big scores at healthy averages in all conditions.

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Cook bids adieu with an enviable average of 48.94 in Australia, 51.45 in India, 48.33 in Sri Lanka, 55.36 in the UAE and 61.57 in Bangladesh. In October 2015, he surpassed Ricky Ponting as the highest-scoring non-Asian in Asia.

sachin tendulkar celebrates century

(Photo by Duif du Toit / Gallo Images/Getty Images)

His average in India is only marginally lower than Sachin Tendulkar (52.67) and VVS Laxman (51.60), and higher than Rahul Dravid (51.35) which talks hugely of his temperament to flourish in all conditions.

Be it the seam and swing of England, bounce and pace of Australia or even the rank turners of Asia, he had ‘the one willow to rule them all’. Talk about taming your demons overseas!

But amidst all these avalanches of records and galore of accomplishments, what Cook adamantly places at the peak of his magnanimous career is his Ashes tour to Australia in 2010/11 where he silenced his critics with 766 runs at a Bradmanesque average of 127.66 which included 3 centuries and 2 fifties.

Cook’s mercurial out of the skin performance catapulted England to an Ashes triumph on Australian soil for the first time in 25 years and there are no prizes for guessing he was adjudged the best player of that series.

What comes at a close second is his heroics in the once-in-a-generation win in India in 2012. Captain Cook led from the front with hundreds in Mumbai, Ahmedabad and Kolkata. He became the only captain to conquer India since David Gower back in 1984-85.

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So what does Alastair Cook’s legacy actually serve as a symbol of? Was it his stint as the captain under whom England can boast of away series wins in Australia, India and South Africa? Or the mammoth runs he piled on for England over the years?

Cook and McCullum

(Photo: AFP)

For me Alastair Cook will always reverberate the aura and ambience of an opener first and a captain second. He was a player who played every single match as an opener, not one of the dashing kind but someone who could barbecue bowlers and send them gasping for breath without even cutting a sweat himself. After all that’s what chefs do, don’t they?

Alastair Cook wasn’t the game’s greatest of tacticians neither the most talented of cricketers. What he was though is someone who’d just said “that’s how I’m gonna do it” and went out and did!

Mind you there was very little pride in the back of his head, a trait that’s somewhat like a normal flora in the minds of sportsmen residing on such a pedestal in their respective fields.

Never again will the cricketing world be offered benediction by the Chef’s special textbook strokeplay, sanctified by his blinders at first slip or pacified by his cherubic smile on the field. For Alastair Nathan Cook has ridden off into the sunset, not like an obfuscating dusk sun but with the same flare as he declared his arrival.

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