Cricket: Captaincy role taking a toll

Englans's Captain Alastair Cook. Photo / AP

Cook's skittish cameo evidence the England skipper must get back into form with bat.

This has been an odd series for Alastair Cook. The satisfaction of retaining the urn in his first Ashes encounter as England captain will have been tempered by concerns about his own contribution.

Sure, his bucket-like hands have been in full working order in the slip cordon. True, he is ahead of his counterpart Michael Clarke in the use of the Decision Review System (and how he needed to be when the unerring eye of technology helpfully negated the doddery incompetence of the on-field umpires).

But Cook is a man who defines himself by his batting. And so far in this series, his batting has been well short of the dazzling peak it attained in his early days as captain.

On day three of this fourth Ashes test, what we saw was a fine batsman struggling to make sense of his dip in form. In the first innings in Durham, he had been scratching and scrabbling around without point or purpose. When Geoffrey Boycott criticises you for being unnecessarily pedestrian, then you know you have a problem.

So when he walked out with Joe Root after Australia had been efficiently dispatched in the morning session, he appeared determined to put such negativity behind him - what followed was a skittish cameo.

Like a golfer who had remodelled his swing overnight, he came out with a new modus operandi. His aggression sent a message back to the dressing room: there can be no hanging around if this test is to be won.

The trouble was, his form has dipped sufficiently to undermine such a radical departure from his standard approach. He was trying to accelerate but velocity is limited when the ball refuses to find the middle of the bat. Try as he might, no one could accuse him of bullying the opposition.

His fidgety impatience appeared to be catching. After Root was dismissed by a beautiful Ryan Harris seamer, Jonathan Trott joined Cook in a nervy quickstep. Where once his entire working method was to bore an opponent into submission, Trott too set out as if involved in a T20 finals day.

As the pair played so palpably against type, flashing and nicking, it was like watching a couple of operatic tenors trying to rap. You knew it could not last. The captain was the first to go, thrashing inelegantly at a wide ball from the admirable Harris and snicking a catch to Brad Haddin.

Cook started in the job as if determined to buck the trend evident in the experience of Michael Vaughan and Andrew Strauss which insisted that the England captaincy inevitably erodes an incumbent's batting. He was imperious in those early days, as close to a banker as it is possible to be in a game as fickle as this. But this series, the weight of the job appears to be taking its traditional toll.

The relentless public duties of the Ashes have dimmed the brightness in his eyes. When the microphone is thrust under his nose, you can almost see his shoulders sagging. Cook is a captain who leads from the front. He is not gung-ho, not big on Henry V oratory, chirpy back-slapping and on-field chivvying. His leadership is described by personal performance. It might be politic to say it is the team that matters, but he knows his effectiveness as captain is diminished if he is not batting well.

How thankful he must be that he has centurymaker Ian Bell - unlikely ever to be emasculated by captaincy - in his team.