Alastair Cook and striking

Alastair Cook has been taking some stick for an interview he gave to the Times magazine on Saturday, in which he suggested that England’s cricketers may go on strike if the international schedule is not reduced.

However, what the detractors have missed here is that Cook was not complaining about his own workload, but that of his teammates.

He even acknowledged that he is ‘pretty much the only one who’s been able to play and to enjoy the experience of winning.’

I would say he is perfectly justified in his complaints. This is a team game, after all.

I have more of a problem with something he says later, that he wants to ‘retain his low-keyness.’ If he’s serious about this, perhaps it might help to avoid top celeb photographer Rankin and the cover of the Times magazine?

More on 1000 runs on a winter tour

#ashes #cricket After extensive research, I think I have uncovered the answer to my own 1000-runs-on-an-overseas-tour question.

The last man was the aforementioned Dennis Amiss, who scored 1120 runs on the MCC tour of the West Indies in 1973-74.

Regarding Ashes tours, the feat was last achieved by two batsman on the 1970-71 tour – Geoff Boycott (1535 runs) and J.H.Edrich (1097 runs).

Alastair Cook could soon be joining that esteemed company – 657 runs and counting.

An interesting #ashes -related statistic from @TMSscorer

TMSscorer

No one has managed 1000 runs NOT in England in any calendar year. Closest is WR Hammond in 1933 with 883 runs

13 hours ago

ps Not sure if this Test or first-class runs, but I think Cook has beaten this record either way - 922 Test runs overseas so far this year, 1141 first-class runs overseas so far this year.

Alastair Cook - on course for an unusual achievement?

#ashes A statistic I always enjoy appears each year in the First-Class Career Records section of Playfair, where the penultimate column within the batting averages shows the instances of batsman scoring 1000 runs in a season (‘where these have been achieved outside the British Isles they are shown after a plus sign’).

And it’s those numbers after the plus sign that I have always found particularly interesting. Nowadays its all overseas players such as H.D. Ackerman or Phil Jacques, but my 1983 Playfair reports that Geoff Boycott and Dennis Amiss both scored 1000 runs in an overseas season.

How they did this, I’m not sure - apart from England, Amiss only played for Warwickshire, and Boycott had just one season with Northern Transvaal in 1971-72. So an England tour seems the only way they could have reached the landmark.

So my question is - when was the last time an English batsman scored 1000 runs on an overseas tour with England? I ask, of course, because Alastair Cook has currently scored 521 runs in Australia, and still has five matches left to play.

Will the penultimate column of his career record in next year’s Playfair read ‘4+1’?

Surprise news: No chop for flop

I have unfollowed @CricketMirror on Twitter. When I saw this tweet earlier today, I felt I had to make a stand.

Selectors resist the temptation to chop flop Alastair Cook: England's settled side have been told to beat Pakistan... http://bit.ly/9LItSt

Did the selectors really ‘resist the temptation’? Did they ever really seriously consider dropping the Essex opener? Is he really a ‘flop’ (remember, he has a Test average of 42) or was it just a word that sounded good next to ‘chop’?

No, no, no and yes.

The possible dropping of Alastair Cook was surely never anything more than a media-driven time-waster. There hasn’t been much else to talk about for the last few days, but something had to fill all those newspapers columns.

A consistent selection policy is great for the team, but terrible for the hacks who find themselves scrabbling around for something, anything, to write about. I wonder what it’ll be before the fourth Test?

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