If it's a performance in adversity you want, well, he had a few. Most would after playing this game for 12-years at that level. But the first hundred in 23 months against West Indies in 2015 strikes a chord for pure relief. So, too, the 95 the year before when he dug deep in Southampton to find something - anything - to do right by his team.it's something more specific. That tuck off the hip to get off the mark. The bounce-and-bob into a defensive shot. The cut lassoed past backward point. Heck, maybe even that Test wicket.the course of the next week, English cricket fans will discuss their favourite Alastair Cook moments after the legendary batsman called time on his illustrious career. And it is the measure of him as a cricketer that there are so many to choose from. The final curtain will come down at The Oval, his 161st Test. Time for one last memory?
Without question, Cook leaves as a great of the game and his country. No Englishman has as many Test runs; no Test batsman as many against the new ball; only five who have played at that level scored more than Cook's current tally of 12,254.
The thread of the Test hundreds seems a neat one to pull on: at least one against every team and in every country he has played. The very first came when parachuted in at Nagpur in 2006, just a day earlier, had been concentrating on making it good on an 'A' tour of West Indies. Scores of 60 and 104 on debut confirmed one of the worst kept secrets in English cricket: Cook was a star in waiting.2006, only 2008 and 2014 has seen him leave a calendar year without a three-figure score. The fifth and final Test against India presents an opportunity to ensure 2018 is not added to that list, though his series form suggests that but for the grace of narrative and goodwill, it is unlikely to come to pass. In seven innings so far, he has managed just 109 at an average of 15.57. told, 33 is no age, particularly for a player who even this summer topped the charts during England's fitness testing. Only Jonny Bairstow, five years his junior, came close to usurping him and even one as stubborn as Bairstow had to cede defeat. But deep down, Cook realised his number was coming up. His body was fine, his mind was spent.
In turn, those scores were not coming as quickly, even if they were plentiful when they arrived. In his last 28 innings, Cook has only passed 50 three times, yet two of those - against West Indies at the end of last summer and Australia in the Boxing Day Test - were taken past 240, too. Evidently, the powers of concentration were still there, but the engine needed a little longer to get going. lead-up to that second big score - an unbeaten 244 at Melbourne - Cook ceded that thoughts of retirement had started to consume him. At the beginning of the summer, he admitted that he had "never been quite so inconsistent". The game was not getting easier.is hard to shake the feeling that Cook will take with him some of the virtues of Test cricket: the value of the grind, the satisfaction of the churn, the sheer audacity of wanting to bat for a day and then doing just that, as he did against India in 2011 with what is his Test best of 294, compiled over the course of 13 hours. height of his powers, he was a player who took Test cricket to its very limits, besting a format that has ruined many promising careers, of men more talented than he. In Cook's purple period between 2009 and 2012, when half of his 32 Test hundreds were scored and he averaged 55, he was what those who dreamed of gracing the format needed to be. Insatiable, indomitable yet aware of his limitations.
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