“A bloke in Melbourne came up to me,” Cook said, recalling the incident from one of his tours to Australia. “Everyone who knows me, knows my memory is…honestly, I’ve got the worst memory in living history of anything. How I haven’t forgotten to do this tonight, I don’t know, but that kind of thing…he came up to me and he just went ‘Great to see you, Cooky! Nice to see you!’

“And I was like, ‘Oh my god’, I stared at him, I could not remember who this was, right? And I was thinking – ‘Right, is he any of my family? Is it my brother? Don’t think it’s my brother. Started going down, started listing like ‘No uncle, no’… Then I start to get to Alice’s friends, I was like ‘No’. Then I was like ‘Did I go to school with him? I was literally trying to lead him with a couple of questions.'”

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Cook, who travelled to Australia for four tours through the course of his Test career, was left standing at the Melbourne airport with the mystery man, hopelessly trying to remember him.

“By the way, we’re in the airport, we’re travelling,” Cook said. “He wouldn’t leave me alone. It got to a stage where I said ‘I’m really sorry, I know we must have met before, but I just can’t remember who you are,’ expecting a really embarrassing ‘I’m your second cousin’ or something. He was like ‘No, no! We met exactly the same place four years ago on the last tour in the same airport. And I was like – ‘Oh brilliant. You expect me to remember that! You expect me to remember that from four years ago!’

“That’s the weirdest [fan] encounter… some of the questions I asked him, trying to lead away. I apologise, but I don’t apologise that much!”