You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone, as Joni Mitchell used to whiffle way back when. And on cricket, as on so much else, the flaxen-haired loopster of Laurel Canyon was right. My friend Fiona took her three boys to the cricket at the Oval last Thursday and a fine time was had by all. Plus they saw an English batsman score a century, which is always a treat, though it was in this case a very false dawn. In decades to come, though, Fiona’s lads will be able to go all rheumy-eyed and describe how they saw England’s finest batsman score a ton against the Springboks, just as my dad did when he talked about Walter Hammond or Len Hutton.
It is my belief that that is how we will look back on the career of Alastair Cook. Consider the stats: he’s joint fifth in the list of England’s all-time Test century makers, with 20, two behind the leaders, Boycott, Cowdrey and Hammond. And Cook is still only 27; Hammond was 44 when he stopped playing. We English are of course still only in the foothills: Jacques Kallis, one of the trio of South African butchers who minced England this week, has 43 Test centuries, and Tendulkar 51. But it is hard to imagine that Cook won’t end up with around 30.
I went to the Oval on Saturday and it was an exercise in uncompetitiveness. Very little happened: Hashim Amla and Kallis looked like they could bat till the end of the Olympics and beyond, there was an annoying Mexican wave, and much fun was had building snakes out of empty plastic glasses. It was low-level but remorseless bullying, like watching the new boy being pushed round the playground by a hard-boiled sixth-former.
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