Cricket: Ever the purist, Alastair Cook is learning to take the rough with the smooth at a time of great change for cricket

For once, Alastair Cook looks like he’s enjoying an interview.

It helps, of course, that his interrogators are not a bunch of cynical journalists with tape recorders, but a gymnasium full of primary school children from Tunbridge Wells in Kent. One of the kids wants to know what countries he’s played in. Another asks how many times he’s been stumped. Once, Cook thinks. (It’s actually four.) Another asks what he thinks about the cheating Australians. It was very bad for sport, Cook replies.

“Now I’ve got a question for you,” the former England captain says when they’re all finished. “Who’s going to go home after this and ask their mums and dads to play some cricket?”

Dozens of hands shoot up.

“There’s a cricket club near here that does sessions after school on Fridays,” Cook continues. “Get your mum or dad or take you along. They can go to the pub while you’re there. Might help sell it to them.”

This is, after all, why we’re all here. Cook believes, with the zeal of a true evangelist, in the power of cricket. This is the future. The blank canvas. The great unconverted. Get even a few of these kids to give cricket a try, and who knows where it might lead? It’s why he’s happily given up his day off, representing the Chance to Shine charity at the launch of Yorkshire Tea’s National Cricket Week. And it’s why he’s overcome his natural reticence for public speaking to address a room full of seven- and eight-year-olds.

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“It’s daunting,” he admits. “Those memories of sitting in assemblies, with legs crossed. 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.”

He’s addressing the crusty old journalists now, rather the wide-eyed kids, but Cook is still in the mood to tackle the big questions. Over a wide-ranging interview, England’s highest ever run-scorer laments the decline of red-ball cricket in favour of what he calls “three-hour crash-bang-wallop”. He restates his commitment to playing Test cricket, despite a difficult winter Down Under. And he voices the suspicions of the England team over just what the Australians were doing with the ball during the Ashes.

But first, to the week’s hot topic. It’s been a few days now since the England and Wales Cricket Board made the shock announcement that its new Twenty20 competition would not, in fact, be Twenty20 at all. Instead, innings will last 100 balls. Traditionalists have been outraged. Non-traditionalists have been outraged. The reactions have ranged from incredulity to ridicule to indifference. Cook, for his part, is withholding judgement.

“If T20 had been launched in 2003 with social media around, there would have been a similar outpouring,” he says. “With anything new, it’s easy to slag it off without thinking about it. 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.”

One counter-argument might be that this is the problem. For many, the ECB’s unscrupulous pursuit of new audiences is not a celebration of cricket, but a revulsion of it, disdaining its current formats in favour of something chintzy and ersatz. And within the headlong rush to monetise the shorter forms of the game lies both a concern, and a warning.

Does Cook fear for the future of red-ball cricket? “Yeah, I do. Sport is an entertainment, in one sense. But it’s also a business. It’s easy to see that crowds at Test matches – not in this country – are down in numbers. As we all know in this game, money talks. At this moment in time, why would you put yourself through the stresses and strains of the five-day game, when you can play three-hour crash-bang-wallop?

“When I watch Twenty20 cricket, there’s a different satisfaction. That hundred you get in six hours is a very satisfying feeling. A real triumph of skill. I don’t quite see that in the 20-over game – or the 100-ball game. 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, if we’re not careful.”

The good news for fans of the England Test team is that Cook’s lust for six-hour hundreds is as strong as ever. Since giving up the Test captaincy early last year, he has averaged a reasonable 39 over his last four series. But that number masks a wild inconsistency. More than half of his runs came in just two innings: the 243 under lights at Edgbaston, and an unbeaten 244 at Melbourne during the Ashes. Beyond that, innumerable small numbers and false starts. And a poor tour of New Zealand has once again raised the spectre of just how much more Cook has to give.

“That tour kind of passed me by,” he says. “If you play 100-odd Test matches, there’s going to be little periods when you don’t score runs, and I’ve always managed to turn it around. But the last six months, I’ve never been quite so inconsistent.”

The arrival of Ed Smith as England’s new National Selector offers the possibility of a fresh broom. Not even 154-cap, 12000-run opening batsmen are safe. Cook admits he is under pressure for his place, same as anyone. “My job never changes,” he says. “It’s to score runs at the top of the order. And if you don’t... well, there have been times throughout my career where people have questioned my place like they’re questioning it now. If someone taps me on the shoulder and tells me they don’t want me to open the batting for England, it’s going to hurt.”

The obverse of this is that with an undercooked England enduring its worst run of form in some years, the stability and experience that Cook offers is needed more than ever. “The strongest team I played in, there were probably 14 cast-iron Test cricketers you could have picked from,” he says, referring to the 2011-era team that won the Ashes away from home and ascended to No 1 in the world. “Pretty much everyone had played 50 Test matches. All the batters were double-figures in centuries. We’re probably not at that stage. But the talent is there.”

Still, things could certainly be worse. Cook was as transfixed as everyone else by last month’s unfolding Australian ball-tampering scandal, and although he was surprised by the reaction, he understood it too. “It was an amazing public outcry,” he says. “And a real reminder of what people want to watch in sport. It was the same in cycling. And the match-fixing, in one sense. When people buy tickets to watch sport, they want to see it done in a fair way. Sometimes, when it feels so important to you, because it’s your profession, your livelihood, winning or losing can take over.”

Did he suspect anything untoward during England’s 4-0 Ashes drubbing, when Australia’s three-man pace attack were occasionally making the ball reverse around corners? “Yeah, a little bit. In Perth, when the outfield was wet after the rain, and they managed to get the ball reversing. We were curious at certain moments in that series.

“Jimmy is obviously very good at reverse swing, but with those drop-in pitches, we didn’t get it going massively. But then we couldn’t get the ball up to 90mph, and they consistently could, so we have to be very careful there. I didn’t see anything.” You might, if you were being exceptionally cynical, posit that Australia were exceptionally unlucky to get caught ball-tampering the very first time they tried it. “You said it, not me,” Cook grins.

Clearly, at the age of 33, Cook has lost none of his thirst for the quiet life. Once the Chance to Shine event is over, he simply gets back in his car and drives back to the family farm in Bedfordshire, his wife and two young daughters. There’s a four-day game for Essex starting on Friday at the Rose Bowl, a County Championship to defend, a Test series against Pakistan next month to prepare for. And when you’ve been around the block as many times as Cook, somehow you learn to ride the rough times as casually as the smooth.

“One thing I do know,” he says, “is that it doesn’t get any easier. I remember talking to a psychologist about Jacques Kallis – he’d just scored his 12,000th run – and saying, he’s cracked the game, 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.

“But while I still want to get out and bat, put myself under pressure, sit in the changing room... I’ve got to do it.”

Alastair Cook was speaking at an event to celebrate the return of Yorkshire Tea National Cricket Week with cricket charity, Chance to Shine. Yorkshire Tea National Cricket Week will take place 18th – 22nd June, giving thousands of children across the country the opportunity to play and learn through cricket.​