With a flick off the pads to the midwicket boundary off the bowling of Nuwan Pradeep against Sri Lanka at Chester-le-Street, Alastair Cook joined an elite few (12) players to make 10000 runs in Test cricket.
No England batter has scored more, and the record will remain a huge monument to his durability, and dedication to the cause of the England Test team. Cook is already the leading scorer of centuries for the national side. It's not obvious that his total runs will ever be exceeded by another England player, and if they are, they will be compiled in the shadow of Cook's achievements.
Here is a retrospective of ten of Cook's most memorable innings.
10. 116 v Australia at the WACA, 2006.
After the landmark 2005 Ashes victory, England's defence in 2006-7 was a hopeless, inadequately prepared misadventure. We should have been prepared for the worst when the Prime Minister's XI humiliated the tourists with a 166 run pasting, the usual omen of a disastrous campaign. And the worst came at the Adelaide Oval, when England were overturned after making 551/6 in the first innings. Heavy defeat by England at the WACA is a tradition; until today, they have lost the last seven Tests there, the only win ever coming against the Packer depleted side of 1978-9. In 2006, England batters had managed one ton in Perth in the previous twenty years (123 by Graham Thorpe in the loss in 1995).
And of course England lost this match,
http://www.espncricinfo.com/ci/engine/match/249224.html mainly in the field, after Australia made 527-5 in their second innings fast enough to give their superb attack sufficient time to close down the game. The tour became a debacle, but here England resisted for nine hours. Cook batted for six hours of those on a ground ideally suited to his back foot game, managing to keep his hook and pulls down and scoring half his runs through square leg and midwicket.
While Cook batted in his idiosyncratic style, in some ways this wasn't a conventional success, by a batter who rarely seems to surprise. It was one of just two hundreds he has made in the fourth innings of a game (the other was in Bangladesh). And it provides the only real middle ground to the feast and famine of Cook's Ashes résumé, being his sole ton not scored on his staggering tour of Australia in 2010-11. But it is part of a curiously excellent record in defeats. Cook has made five hundreds in losses. Of his contemporaries, Ian Bell didn't make any, and Jonathan Trott and Kevin Pietersen only made one apiece. I take that as a positive, that Cook scored runs when his team mates were struggling. It was his fourth Test ton, on his second tour. Maybe with this knock he learned enough about batting in Australia to score 766 on his next tour. But, for this time, after this Perth defeat, the Ashes were gone once more.
I always say that everybody's right.