The slower you bowl, the faster people are to make up their minds about you. Which means that if you work at Sam Cook’s pace, the margins are pretty slim. There have been plenty of English bowlers round about Cook’s 80mph who got only a summer of Test cricket, some who were allowed only a single series, a handful who were given just the one Test.
England used to make a tradition of picking a new one every spring, so you’ll probably find that bloke in the tracksuit teaching the colts how to bowl at the club down the road had a gig opening the bowling for their country once upon a summer.
By the time Cook was five balls into his debut, people were already wondering exactly where his Test match career was leading. He had conceded three fours back to back to back, one spat off the inside edge of Brian Bennett’s bat, the second squirted away through square leg, the third driven, with crisp precision, through cover.
Cook doesn’t have any great pace through the air, he isn’t a strapping six-foot-something, so can’t make the ball shoot from back of a length, he doesn’t offer an awkward angle, or have an unusual action, and he doesn’t bat worth much of a damn, either. But he does have 321 first-class wickets at an average of 19, and coming on for a decade’s worth of experience in county cricket. Question is exactly what that’s worth to the coaching regime running this England team, who, as a rule, prefer to pick a bowler they believe could succeed in Test cricket over one who’s already shown that he can in the championship.
After a lifetime on the circuit, Rob Key seems to have come out of it as an apostate, as if, having seen it from the inside, he knows the county game too well to put very much trust in it. And while Brendon McCullum swears he wants to live where his feet are, they seldom seem to be at a county ground. England picked Josh Hull last year even though he had taken only 16 wickets at an average of 63 each. Shoaib Bashir is still the first-choice spinner even though he dismissed just three people in the four games he played for Glamorgan this year. And Zak Crawley has tenure at the top of the order even though he hadn’t scored a hundred in 12 months.
Picking Cook, then, is as much as England have done to offer a fillip for good old county cricket, even if you suspect the truth is that the selectors were more impressed by his performances for England Lions during their tour of Australia in the winter than the ones he put in for Essex during the summer before it. He took 13 wickets there, including three for 58 against Australia A, which won him an audition for the one slot England keep open for a medium-fast bowler. He will be competing for it with Matty Potts and Chris Woakes, who was written off as too slow for Test cricket himself during his debut against Australia at the Oval in 2013.
Ben Stokes certainly set Cook up to make a success of it. He gave him the first over, which was the first time in more than 30 years that an England captain had trusted a bowler playing his first game to open the innings (the last was, ah,Martin McCague, which didn’t seem like the best omen). Stokes set Cook a game field, too, of four slips and two gullies.
Cook’s sixth ball was his first good delivery, it was a couple of feet shorter and a couple of inches wider, and whistled past Bennett’s bat. In his second over he got a similar delivery to fly off Bennett’s edge, low past second slip. And in his third he got his first wicket, when he got the ball to straighten off a length. It took Ben Curran’s edge and was caught at second slip by Harry Brook. Cook was utterly overcome in the moment, and ran off screaming towards Brook. He had been waiting a long time for his first. He may yet end up waiting a while for his second, too.
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Because his second and third and fourth spells came and went without him picking up anyone else, there were a couple of could-have-beens, a few nearly-but-not-quites, most obviously when he got Bennett to edge the ball waist high through the empty third slip area, but that was it.
If anything, Cook seemed to be bowling too full and too straight too often, as if he was searching for the wickets rather than waiting for them to come. He was trying too hard, which is understandable in the circumstances. Medium-fast bowling is a game of patience, but it must be hard to bide your time when you know you might have so little of it to work with.