No Favours In The Press Box, Please!

Freshly knighted but perhaps not so freshly minted after the lambing season on his wife’s farm, Sir Alastair Cook begins his new life as a former

- Derek Pringle

England cricketer – an existence that will mean notching up the runs for Essex and giving his tuppence worth for the BBC as well as in a weekly column for the Sunday Times.

A gig in the media is what former captains of England can expect these days, and many have made the leap from player to commentator in print, vision or sound, and sometimes in all three.

Cook kicked off his Sunday Times column giving a big interview to the paper’s chief sports columnist, David Walsh, an excellent journalist who, irony of ironies, also ghosted Kevin Pietersen’s last book The Autobiography. In that tome, Pietersen described Cook as cricket’s Ned Flanders, one assumes for being a goody two-shoes unwilling to criticise team mates and coaches even in private.

As rangy interviews tend to do, there is a bit of archaeology, exhuming bits of Cook’s past to serve as pointers to what made him click well enough to become England’s top-scoring batsman in Tests. In that respect, most of the piece jogs along nicely until the jarring revelation towards the end that, irrespective of his new role, he will not criticise James Anderson or Stuart Broad, both current players and two bowlers to which the England teams under Cook’s captaincy teams owe much of their success.