Alastair Cook is one of the greats of the game and his numbers prove that

I WOULD class Alastair Cook as an all-time great of the game.

People always overlook his achievements because he is not as easy on the eye as some that have gone before him.

But while aesthetically he might not be up there with Brian Lara and Sachin Tendulkar, numbers are numbers.

And he is now the youngest ever player to score 10,000 Test runs.

He has also reached that landmark as an opener – just the second to do so – and you don’t get many easy runs batting at the top of the order.

People will argue he has not got as much talent as others.

But I say talent is not just how good you look and how easy you see the ball, it is how you convert that into big scores.

And to be able to play ten years and average 1,000 runs a year is a phenomenal effort.

Those that don’t appreciate how good he is don’t get the game.

I am made up for him and there will be very few people in the country that are not.

There will obviously be one or two, but I think most people realise what a good bloke he is.

He would do anything for the good of the team and he is the most selfless man I know.

It will have suited him that he got to 10,000 here, without a full house, because he didn’t want a big deal being made out of it, he just wanted it out of the way.

He will not have celebrated lavishly. He will have had a bottle of beer and a glass of red wine, and then gone to see his wife Alice to talk about sheep for two hours.

But this achievement will mean a lot to him because he is a stat man through and through.

His record is also remarkable when you think of some of the troughs he has gone through in his career.

He came close to losing his place for good in 2010, when he was in the last-chance saloon at the Oval against Pakistan.

But he hit a brilliant hundred to book his place on that Ashes tour to Australia when he scored all those runs.

And Cooky has not looked back from there and hopefully he can go on to break even more records.

He keeps himself fit and, as long as he is still hungry and enjoying it, he can carry on playing for as long as he wants.

Tendulkar is the leading Test run-scorer with 15,921 runs.

But Cooky is only 31 so who knows how many more he can get?