Alastair Cook fears for future of Test cricket as he closes in on Allan Border record

On Friday, for Essex at Hampshire, Alastair Cook straps the pads on again.

This will be his 13th summer as a Test cricketer and his 16th overall. He made his Championship debut the summer T20 was launched and, all being well, at Lord’s next month, he should equal Allan Border’s record for the most successive Test matches, 153.

Cook remembers playing alongside the man charged with deciding whether he matches Border’s record, England’s new national selector, Ed Smith. He has been a constant as the game has changed rapidly and radically.

Three days from the start of another summer, Cook is chatting and playing cricket with schoolkids as he launches the Yorkshire Tea National Cricket Week with the charity Chance To Shine, which takes place from the June 18-22.

"They’d been told well,” he jokes, when asked if any of them knew who he was, a nod to the ECB’s infamous nugget of marketing research that found more children recognised the wrestler John Cena than Cook. But then again, none of his 12,000 Test runs have been scored on free TV. However, the kids are in thrall of him, asking for autographs and giving him a guard of honour on arrival.

“It’s daunting,” he says of his responsibilities as a flag-bearer for a sport that constantly convinces itself that it’s in crisis. “Those memories of sitting in assemblies. But if I’d been eight years old and an England cricketer had come to the school I’d have been, like… gawp. It’s weird being that bloke who can do it.”

Cook concedes his fears for the future of long-form cricket and wonders whether his like, the long-former, will be seen again.

“Yeah I do [fear for Test cricket],” he says. “Sport is an entertainment in one sense but it’s also a business and obviously all the money goes into the T20 cricket at the moment. It’s easy to see that certain crowds at certain Test matches — although not in this country — are down in numbers.

“Talking to the Essex lads after James Foster got a very gusty 70 which probably won us that game [against Lancashire on Sunday], the satisfaction you get from that is very different to the satisfaction of the guy who got 30 off 11 balls for Rajasthan Royals. I wonder if that’s going to be lost in cricket if we’re not careful.

“Why would you put yourself through the stresses and strains of the five-day game when you can play two-and-a-half hour crash-bang-wallop?”

Ah, the Hundred. “I’ll have a hack!” says Cook, of the ECB’s remarkable new idea to slim the game down for a new audience, before providing a reminder that he has a T20 century. He is open-minded, cautiously optimistic even, about how things will pan out for a concept he describes as “un-English” but always has an eye on what it means for the red-ball game. “Like everything it’s how it fits in with trying to preserve the county summer,” he says. “If you go back to 2003, with Twenty20, everyone would have laughed and said it wasn’t going to work and was going to ruin everything.

“It’s turned out very different. Yes, it’s changed the landscape of cricket and whether this 100-ball game will change the landscape I don’t know but I don’t think we should totally write it off… If the entertainment is good and the whole package is done well, then the cricket becomes a bit of a sideshow.”

The cricket will not be a sideshow at the Ageas Bowl on Friday. His 16th summer starts with him searching for form after two torrid Tests in New Zealand brought just 23 runs and an Ashes propped up by an epic innings in Melbourne. While putting it down to the fickle nature of form, he knows his returns are increasingly feast or famine and he cannot rest on reputation; he took Essex’s opening two games off to prepare properly.

“One thing I do know is that it doesn’t get any easier,” he says. “I remember talking to a psychologist watching Jacques Kallis and he’d just reached 12,000 runs, and thinking, ‘He can just turn up and bat’. And the bloke said to me, ‘Mate, you’re wrong’. If you ever get there, it’ll be just as hard as when you started.”

For now, Cook’s focus is not on the wider state of the game but impressing Smith. “My job never changes,” he says. “It’s to score runs.”