Can The Chef Stay On Boil After Being A Test Star For So Long?

Derek Pringle discusses the issues that former England captain Alastair Cook will have to confront as he returns to the county ranks

There is a song, about returning American soldiers at the end of the Great War, whose title poses the question – “How you gonna keep ‘em down on the farm when they’ve seen Paree?”

The same query might be directed to Test cricketers of longstanding, returning to county cricket without the promise of that higher office (Paree or Paris) to motivate them – players like Sir Alastair Cook.

It must take a special mind to have driven Cook the batsman to the heights of becoming England’s leading runscorer in Tests as well as its greatest century-maker, but then to return him to county cricket with Essex, a knight. In the words of one former cricketer: “It’s like going from high octane to the mundane,” though in his day you could not have the cream without a good helping of gruel to accompany it.

Like many you might be forgiven for wondering just what is going on here. Aren’t modern cricketers meant to be mini-plcs, always looking for bigger and better things – not downsizing, which is how going back to county cricket will seem to many?

The answer to this conundrum, at least when applied to Cook, may lie in the players that influenced him during his career, namely Graham Gooch. Central contracts didn’t exist in Gooch’s day so he was able to give as much attention to Essex as to England, perhaps more so given that he was banned from the latter after joining a rebel tour to South Africa.