For the former captain, this has been a rare golden summer and he may just be ripe for a Gooch-like late career surge as the South Africa Test series looms
Comfort often arrives in unexpected places. The last two years of Alastair Cook’s time as England captain were fretful at times, marked by scratchiness, defeats and some elbow-gnawing press conferences, an understandable sense of basic human metal fatigue at the prospect of being forced to communicate yet again in a series of terse, angsty soundbites in front of a board covered with adverts.
Cook is a good man and a wonderful cricketer but his manner has perhaps chimed with something a little alienating, a sense that here is a child entirely of the ECB bubble, every one of those 11,000 Test runs scored in entitled isolation, poster boy for his sport’s retreat behind the veil. Famously a piece of in-house marketing found that more British schoolchildren could identify John Cena, the pinheaded American wrestle-actor, than the captain of the England cricket team. How we laughed. But it is also a little sad.
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