Day three at the MCG and England’s embattled opener refuses to throw away England’s advantage in a brilliant exhibition of concentration and strokeplay.
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Walking to the ground. Tense. But hopeful. England fans dreading that yesterday was yet another false dawn, dreaming that it was the start of something special.
England’s set batsmen Cook and Root gave them a steady start, but then the skipper, as has been his wont, did exactly what the large English contingent didn’t want, and threw it away with a cheap dismissal, pulling Cummins to give Nathan Lyon an easy catch. The England captain was visibly annoyed, hurling his gloves to the turf as he walked off. He has now converted just five of his last 27 scores of 50 into hundreds. Were England about to throw it away again?
In the evening session Cook went up a gear or two, scoring 67 runs and fittingly reaching a double hundred with another imperious straight drive. He then passed Viv Richards’ ground record for a player against Australia of 208 before going past another West Indian legend, Brian Lara, from the penultimate ball of the day to become the sixth highest Test run-scorer of all time.
While still playing each ball on its merits, Cook danced down the track to Lyon and deposited him over mid-on, back cut and drove the quicks to distraction, and even shimmied down to Pat Cummins. He started yesterday averaging 13.83 in this series. He ended it having scored more runs than anyone except Steve Smith and averaging 54.50; 61,389 people had seen something a bit special.
Alastair Cook turned 33 three days ago, on Christmas Day. He is younger than Shaun Marsh, a tad older than David Warner and Usman Khawaja. Please God he plays for plenty of years yet.
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