Alastair Cook, you deserve an English Goodbye
In France they call it an English Goodbye, the kind of goodbye where a guest at a party slips off discreetly without saying a word to avoid the protracted business of hugs and kisses and handshakes. On a still September day in south-east London Alastair Cook was offered whatever the opposite of this is, the English Top Test Run-Scorer’s Goodbye, a goodbye so prolonged in its successive ovations there would be members of the crowd leaping to their feet in their sleep tonight at the muscle memory of that warm and surely unprecedented farewell, reports The Guardia.
At the centre of all this was The Ovation, the one that surged around this low-rise bowl like a breaking wave 15 minutes before lunch as Cook scored the runs that took him to a farewell hundred in his final Test innings. Resuming on 46 overnight, he had nudged and blocked, then begun to play with a disarming freedom, before cantering through the 90s. On 91 there was a delicious drive for four straight down the ground off Jasprit Bumrah that drew coos and gurgles as Cook stood up tall in the regal manner, the kind of shot that might have been played wearing silk gloves and brandishing a malacca cane.
From there every single was applauded urgently. Finally, with Cook on 96 a ball from Ravindra Jadeja was clipped to Bumrah for a single, then transformed into the moment of the Test match summer by a terrible throw back to the bowler’s end that scudded off to the boundary across the hard dry square.
And that was that. Enter the Daddy ovation, the 10th ovation of 13 to Cook’s name so far in this game, from his first appearance on the field to leading the teams off at the close of play. It was always going to be like this here. The Oval is English cricket’s much-loved family funeral parlour, a place of final Tests in hazy September sun, of last things and endings, the field full of shades, my Curtly and Courtney of long ago.
It cannot have seen many like this, though. And certainly not at 12.45pm on a grey Monday as the ground rose on all sides for that 33rd Test hundred. Cook stood waving his bat, a batsman’s salute that became a wave goodbye, though in Cook fashion this was a slightly scratchy kind of wave, a wave off the pads for one. As the players waited to resume, the ovation refused to die, drawing a grin and a shrug from Cook and another wave, an undemonstrative man taking a genuine pleasure in the moment of valediction.
In the wrong company this might have felt a little mawkish, a little Princess Diana. But Cook is a genuine sporting great, a genius at the hard art of unshowy resistance, in a sport that venerates those who play it in a uniquely personal way. This was more like a Viking farewell.
And so Cook will bat no more for England. He ends with 12,472 runs off 26,562 balls at an average of 45.35, with 33 hundreds and 57 fifties. In all he hit 1,442 fours and (it says here) 11 sixes. The best times will continue to shine. The peak was the 2011-12 Ashes, when Cook scored 766 unhurried runs and filled the skies for one glorious Australian summer without wasting a bead of sweat. India 2012-13 was another high, the sweet spot of Cook’s captaincy. For those who watched it that 190 at Eden Gardens was one of those innings that plays quietly in some tiny space at the back of your mind on an endless loop for as long as you choose to remember.
From here there will be one more day of applause, with fresh ticket holders through the door on Tuesday, but beyond that we are now pretty much done here. At which point one or two farewell conclusions present themselves.
Most obviously, and with all due deference, this is clearly the wrong decision on a sporting level. Farewell innings are supposed to be redolent with frailties, to offer some note of death. This was something else. Past the hundred there was a beautiful Saeed Anwar-style drive through cover. The pull shot emerged once, that lovely moment of abandon where all watchfulness disappears and the bat just whirls through like Mr Banks in Mary Poppins suddenly hurling his bowler into the air.
Cook played with a fluency that cannot simply be put down to the relief of packing it in. He is clearly still the best opening batsman in England, albeit, yes, this is a bit like being the most terrifying gerbil. England’s loss is county cricket’s significant gain.
Beyond this there was a note of sadness buried within the applause. Cook is a popular cricketer, cherished in a quiet way, an unflashy seducer of the crowds. The perfect staging, a hundred in his final innings, was a huge amplifying factor. But it is still hard to think of another English player who has had a goodbye quite like this, just as it is hard not to feel other kinds of anxiety, other farewells beneath the swell of emotion.
Cricket itself is in the process of changing, the Test match rhythms Cook embodies menaced by competing forces elsewhere. It is a period of change his entire England career has coincided with and run alongside; and which he now leaves behind to an echo of sustained, quietly hungry applause.