Sportsmen take the piss at every opportunity, of course, so I didn’t get away scot free. I had wanted to come across as thoughtful, despite the obvious intensity of emotion I felt, so ended with a light-hearted apology for dampening the mood. Moeen Ali, who has a dry sense of humour and a quick wit, shot back: ‘Well, you just have, haven’t you?’ Not his best line, perhaps, but enough to crack everyone up.
Somehow, I managed to condense twelve years of international cricket, and a lifetime of support, into a 395-word retirement statement, released from Lord’s at noon the following day. I tried to capture my pride, my sense of purpose and the pragmatism of the player who knows it is time to go. I expressed my gratitude to my mentor, Goochy, and to the Barmy Army, but above all to my family. They are the constant in a cricketer’s life, the foundation on which so much can be built.
The response was humbling, uniformly warm and respectful. I don’t care what anyone says, when you are reading nice things about yourself for two or three days straight it creates a weird sense of detachment; it’s almost an out-of-body experience. It felt like I was reading my obituary – one of my friends even texted me, asking, ‘Are you dead?’
I played golf with Jimmy at Woburn before we reported to the Oval for the final Test. He grabbed a photo of me sitting in an armchair in the clubhouse, reading a newspaper article with the headline: ‘Cook the Modern Legend Calls It a Day’. Inevitably, the image was posted on his Instagram account with the comment: ‘The thing I love most about Cookie is that he has absolutely no ego.’
Ed Smith, the England national selector, had called during the round to check I was still in the right frame of mind to play in the last Test. I hope he excuses the white lie I told at the time, to cover up the reality that I was struggling with the fear of letting people down. The build-up was surreal, since everything, from the last net to the valedictory press conference, had an element of finality.
People were kind, considerate, and unwittingly challenging. ‘Just go out and enjoy it,’ they told me. ‘It doesn’t matter how many runs you get.’ Well, sorry, but it did. Cricket is one of the only sports where you are primarily defined by your statistics. Runs are your currency, and the thought of ending with a pair in my last Test made me more nervous than at any time in the previous 160.
I was driven back to the standards I set myself, the fear of failure that spurred me to perform constantly under pressure. That desperation to do well, dealing with anxiety created by the expectations of people you will probably never meet, takes its toll mentally. Did that process involve a degree of self-worth? I honestly don’t know, but I needed to live up to the numbers.
I had to dig deep, work bloody hard for every single run I scored down the years. Ambition is double-edged. I remembered being in a lift at Edgbaston with Michael Vaughan early in my career, when he told me I could score 10,000 Test runs. That very quietly became a huge goal of mine. When I fulfilled it, a tiny light went out.
Looking back, that was because I realized it would never get easier, and I needed additional motivation. I spent the next six months or so searching for what, deep down, I knew would be an artificial target. I thought about seeking forty Test hundreds, and ended with thirty-three, but I never found what I was looking for, a goal that consumed me. The fact I can live comfortably with that tells me there wasn’t too much substance to the quest.
Unusually, I slept well the night before the final Test began. I didn’t need to use the trick I developed on the road with Graeme Swann, where alarms would be set for 2 a.m., so we could go straight back to sleep in the knowledge we had another four hours before the pressure ratcheted up again. Barking mad, against the logic of sports science, but effective, without preventing the anxiety dreams which assail many batsmen.
In the classic cricket dream I’m waiting to bat. I know I will be timed out if I can’t get my kit on, and I’m thrashing around, trying to find my pads. I have two other recurring dreams; in the first I go for an easy three, but I’m run out by half a pitch because it is as if my legs are trapped in treacle. In the second I’m playing indoors while everyone else is playing outdoors; instead of getting a boundary when I find the gap, the ball rebounds off the wall to the bowler, who runs me out.
I’ve always been an early bird, so leaving the team hotel near Tower Bridge at 8 a.m. felt like a lie in. For the first time, a group of us, including Jimmy, Keaton Jennings and James Foster, the former England wicketkeeper who has been a long-term teammate at Essex, decided to travel by Tube; one stop on the District line, five more on the Northern line and we were there. A few commuters did a double take, and we took a photograph for posterity, but it was hassle free.
At 10.15 we began warming up, which can be incredibly dull. I have such respect for athletes who are enslaved by conditioning coaches, doing plyometrics day in, day out. There’s no need for such regimentation in international cricket, because players know their own roles and listen to their bodies. We slip into individual routines once the toss is conducted, half an hour before play.
The highlight of the morning was a light-hearted fifteen-minute game of football on the outfield. I’m not that great, but at least I don’t have Ben Stokes’s delusions of grandeur; he thinks he’s David de Gea when he’d struggle to get a game in goal for the Dog ’n’ Duck. I know people worry about unnecessary injury, but it takes my mind off what’s to come.
Some openers secretly relish losing the toss and fielding, since it postpones the pressure, but I was keen to get on with it. I have a set routine: change into whites, insert box, put on right thigh guard, and then inner thigh guard. The process ends with me strapping on my right pad, and then my left. I like the same sense of order at the crease, where I scar the ground by dragging my studs on the line of my guard after every delivery.
You are taught as an eleven-year-old to give yourself sufficient time to adjust to the light before you bat. I did so by rehearsing my stance, and playing the occasional imaginary shot on the glass-fronted balcony. It felt like I was an attraction in a human zoo; I couldn’t help but notice the cameras and phones being trained in my direction from a scrum of spectators at the bottom of the Bedser Stand.
I didn’t have a tear in my eye as I walked on to the outfield, in deference to the legend of Don Bradman’s final Test, at the Oval, when a 0 took his average below 100. I was too busy concentrating on not tripping up, because spikes are tricky on those stairs. The noise surprised me, and grew in intensity as I strode, self-consciously, through the guard of honour.
I entered the game at seventeen, determined to carve my name on it, though playing for England was an Everest-like image, peeking through the clouds in the distance. Yet there I was, shaking the hand of Virat Kohli, Indian captain and national hero, and feeling real warmth and a rare sense of affinity from a capacity crowd. Nervous? Of course. The only antidote was an immersion in familiar virtues.
I’m not big on slogans, but over the years, I determined to be the best version of me that I could be. No gimmicks, no fashion statements, no borrowed habits. I took my usual guard, two, or middle and leg. Then a reminder of the basics: one of the tricks to opening the batting for England is to play the next ball as if the last one never happened.
Watch. The. Ball.
No one really enjoys an innings, especially in the early stages, because it is so fraught with danger. This was double jeopardy, because failure, on this first morning, wasn’t purely personal. It would have disappointed so many people. The relief when I got off the mark to the seventh ball I faced, with a push for three, was immediate and intense.
Posterity will record that was the shot that took me to 1,000 Test runs at the Oval. My attention was seized by the flock of pigeons, pecking away at the outfield. They serve no useful purpose, other than to interfere with the grind of concentration and accumulation. A top footballer like Harry Kane can have a poor opening twenty minutes and still have time to excel. If I do the same, I’m back in the pavilion, more often than not.
Moeen Ali had told me, earlier in the week, that it was written that I would get a hundred. He was one innings out, yet I began to believe him when I was dropped in the gully soon after lunch, when I had made 37. Mystic Mo’s certainty about my destiny grew with our partnership; his confidence made me smile when I brought my 50 up.
Athletes are taught to prioritize process over outcome, but once I passed 60 the prospect of a century became real. ‘Shit, I might be able to do this,’ I thought. Mistake. I dragged the ball on, an inside edge into the middle stump from a decent-length delivery that didn’t bounce as much as I expected, and was dismissed for 71.
The gift horse had bolted. I was annoyed but made a conscious effort to register and respond to the applause, because it could have been the last walk back with an innings of substance behind me. The chances of successive half-centuries weren’t great. Once we had dismissed India for 292, and I had ten minutes to prepare for my 291st, and final, Test innings, I tried to take it all in. Time passed surprisingly slowly. When I emerged on the balcony, I noticed everyone in the crowd had turned to face me.
Forty minutes’ play remained before tea when I walked to the crease. I didn’t want this to be the last day I batted for England, since a large group of family and friends were coming to watch me the following morning. I knew they’d be following my progress on TV, or on their phones. No pressure, Chef. I had a simple mental mantra: ‘Don’t make this the last ball.’ It is amazing what you can train your brain to do.
Batting is so instinctive, and you have so little time to react, that movements become automatic. Thoughts might flash through your mind – ‘Get forward’, ‘Don’t play a cover shot’, ‘Do play a cover shot’, ‘Don’t pull this one, leave it’ – but I tended to rely on trigger words or phrases to aid my concentration. On this endless afternoon, I followed principles I had discussed with Bawds years before.
Commit and watch the ball.
The aim was to be able to take my pads off in the dressing room, knowing that I had followed that instruction, whether I had scored 0 or 100. For a while, I needed only to look at the back of my bat for a reminder of my priority. It carried the name of a sponsor, Clydesdale Bank. ‘C’ and ‘B’. Commit to the Ball.
In terms of temperament I wasn’t that different from the young lad who flew halfway round the world to make his Test debut against India in Nagpur in 2006, but my technique had improved. I was a better driver of the ball, left it with greater accuracy, was more confident off my legs and more capable of hitting the short ball for four. I was able to get my weight back into the ball, and my hands were a lot closer together.
We all have our hallmarks. I make two taps of the bat as I prepare to face. The bat is raised to thigh height, and then raised again. Keep the head still, the knees flexible, shoulders slightly open. Move back and across the crease, to help play off the back foot. Then it’s down to the other guy, with the ball in his hand. He’s pretty good at what he does.
I played and missed at four deliveries from Mohammed Shami, moral defeats that didn’t matter when he gave me the chance to straight drive for four. I held the follow-through, and walked forward, like a golfer reading the line of a putt into the hole. I made eye contact with the bowler, and we both smiled. The game within the game was underway.
I’d looked in all sorts of trouble, needed luck to survive, but that cameo proved the next delivery is all that matters. I suppose it also confirmed I could deal with the hullaballoo, isolate outside influences and focus on the ball coming towards me. I wasn’t in the zone golfers talk about, where events occur in slow motion and the crowd is a multichromatic blur, but I was at ease with myself.
I was 46 not out overnight, grateful that Rooty had taken most of the strike in a nervy last fifteen minutes. He wanted two from the final ball of the day, but I strolled a single. There was no way I wanted to be first up the following morning, because I didn’t want to get out to the first delivery of the day on this, of all occasions. That nigh Ian Elliott, my former partner at Maldon, passed on important news from Statto, the club’s resident numbers man. I needed four more runs to secure an average of 45, and thirty to beat Kumar Sangakkara on the all-time lists.
I reached that second milestone with a crudded single. ‘I didn’t know that,’ I mentioned to Rooty, when the screens announced the news. ‘You’re a fucking liar,’ he laughed, reading my smile. I knew the century was on; when it arrived, at 12.43 on Monday, 10 September 2018, it was a mixture of high drama and low comedy.
I took an easy single to deep gully on 96, thought, ‘That’s one closer,’ and then saw Jasprit Bumrah launch the return, harder than he’d ever thrown it. ‘Run, run, run,’ screamed Rooty. I followed the ball out of the corner of my eye as it sped towards Cheteshwar Pujara who, thankfully, isn’t the quickest fielder on the deep point boundary.
I started laughing when I realized he was never going to get it. The ball ended in the groundsman’s hut, a suitably surreal footnote to a moment that meant so much. It would have been nice to get there with a poetic flourish, or a favourite shot, but to be brutally honest I’ll take it. Mo might just have been right. It was written.
The ovation was amazing, rolling around the place like thunder. It just kept on going. Rooty hugged me hard and didn’t need to say a word. I raised my bat towards the boys behind the glass on the dressing-room balcony and saw movement that, on closer inspection of TV replays two days later, involved Jimmy pogoing up and down like a five-year-old.
Thank God I didn’t cry. I came close, exhaled deeply and regularly, tried and failed to keep things in the present tense. I went back down the wicket, urged Joe to ‘watch the ball’, but the words had little immediate meaning. They couldn’t reflect the purity of my happiness. I found myself looking at the crowd and thinking, ‘Boy, they must be having a good time.’
I knew Mum would be somewhere, in tears. I thought of Alice’s sacrifices, in putting her life on hold for my cricket, and hoped the girls would remember the moment. Jack, our son, was due to be born the following day, but hung around for a couple of weeks before making an appearance.
By that time I had learned that Gemma Broad, Stuart’s sister, had sat for half an hour in a B&Q car park, listening to the radio in anticipation of me reaching a century she was determined not to miss. When I did so she leapt up and screamed; suddenly self-conscious, she looked at the adjoining car, where the driver was also in tears.
Sport has that effect on people. Strangers share your life without you knowing. It is an emotional, communal experience. I probably walked off too quickly when I was out that afternoon, since Jonny Bairstow had to scamper after me to offer his congratulations, but I felt I’d gone out on the right note.
2. Boy to Man
Suddenly, I was alone. My parents said their farewells, turned, and were gone. My companions, as I sat on my bed in the dormitory at the St Paul’s Cathedral choir school, were a brown teddy bear and a soft rubber cube, which I would gnaw when I was nervous, and throw at the wall when I needed catching practice.
I was aged eight. I felt awkward, confused, horrible. When I started to cry someone asked me whether I was homesick. ‘No, I’m not sick of home,’ I replied, with childish logic. ‘I want to go home.’ I would never want my children to experience that feeling, but there is absolutely no doubt the experience made me the cricketer I became.
It was pretty brutal. Even on that first evening, when I longed for the certainties of life in the Essex village of Wickham Bishops, we were expected to buckle down to choir practice. There was no gentle transition to this other world, just immediate immersion in the disciplines of our new craft. We were expected to learn quickly about the power of concentration and performing under pressure.
Choir practice, with vocal techniques and sight-reading, began at 7.45 a.m., before a normal six-and-a-half-hour academic day started at 9 a.m. We would practise for forty-five minutes until 5 p.m., when we would participate in the hour-long Evensong service. Supper
provided half an hour’s respite and preceded ninety minutes of academic homework and music practice. Lights were out at 9 p.m.
Our playground was a walled concrete rectangle measuring no more than five metres by ten, though it seemed much bigger. I longed for Thursday afternoons, when cathedral services were replaced by football or cricket in Regent’s Park. We resumed Evensong on Friday and had a long morning rehearsal on Saturday before a four-hour window to meet our parents. We sang in three services on Sunday, including Choral Matins and Sung Eucharist.
There are parallels here with professional cricket. The choir school, founded with the cathedral in 604 and instituted in its modern form in 1123, when eight boys in need of alms were taken in and educated, has the same reverence for history and tradition. You are expected to be a team player, to commit to a common creed of dedication and self-discipline. The world is often watching.
It is always interesting to search for the man by studying photographs of the boy. I’m on duty, conscious of the camera, during a promotional shot in the cathedral alongside Dame Kiri Te Kanawa. I’m second from the left in the front row, dressed in a black surplice with a red sash and white ruff. Two hands on the lit candle, just in case.
That’s one representation of me. The other emerges in classroom shots, where my grey shirt is untucked and my tie has ridden above the collar. Let’s just say my blazer has growing room. Another picture has me, eyes on the ball, executing what looks suspiciously like a slog sweep on the way to scoring 110 out of a total of 127 for the choir’s cricket team.
When that was taken, I was a novice in a world of international tours, performances in front of royalty, Proms and recording sessions. I relished the freedom of holidays and developed enduring resilience, but as I grew older, began to question the sheltered nature of life. Playing representative cricket for London Schools was a release, though cathedral staff were none too happy when it led to an invitation to an England training camp over Easter.
The Autobiography Page 2
