Alastair Cook :The captain England needed, not the one it deserved

Former Essex captain Doug Insole once said that the role of a captain was one of “a public relations officer, agricultural consultant, psychiatrist, accountant, nursemaid and diplomat”. So yeah, it is not an easy job. Especially when you're captaining an international cricket team. Some people are born into leadership, other achieve it. For Alastair Cook, it was neither of the two. Captaincy was a role he just assumed.

For a man so obsessed with scoring runs, it wasn't remarkable that Cook hardly seemed concerned with things other than his own batting, and trusted others with their own decisions. Especially with the bowling unit. He knew he had trustworthy bowlers in James Anderson and Stuart Broad, and allowed them to devise their own tactics and set their own fields. And at the beginning of his captaincy, it paid off too.

What he did in that series was simple. He concentrated on what he could do best. Racking up tons of runs, and allowed the others to do their own thing. Because he knew the pitches would turn, he played two spinners, and both Graeme Swann and Monty Panesar outperformed the Indian spinners in India, and Jonathon Trott and Ian Bell also scored runs to help England to one of their greatest victories ever.

However, allowing everyone to do their own thing might not be such a good idea, when your team has a certain Kevin Pietersen. Getting him back in the side was not an easy decision, especially after the infamous 'Textgate'. Cook presided over his reintegration into the team and ensured the past stayed in the past. Pietersen responded to the trust shown in him by scoring a magnificent 186 in the second Test at Mumbai, an innings that many feel was responsible for turning the series around. The camaraderie, unfortunately for England, did not last long, and they lost one of their best ever cricketers to reasons not related to cricket.

After a bad couple of years, Cook returned for the third phase of his captaincy, where he had a new-look, younger team to lead. And this time, he took charge. When the Australians came back for the Ashes, he showed that he was a different captain now. He declared an innings when his team was nine-down allowing his bowlers to have a go at the opposition batsmen before lunch. He experimented more with his field placements now, once giving Joe Root a helmet and putting him at short third slip. At the end of the series, he became only the third England captain, after Mike Brearley and WG Grace, to win two Ashes series at home. For a man who did not take captaincy seriously early on, being third on a list followed by those two greats was a big deal.

His batting form though, never could match the heights he touched during the early days of his captaincy. It was still better than most other players, but mediocre, by Cook's high standards. Five out of his 10 hundreds as a captain came in his first nine matches. In his last two series as captain, he had just three 50+ scores in 14 innings. Bangladesh exposed his new-found weakness against left-arm spin, with Mehedi Hasan dismissing him thrice in two matches. Ravindra Jadeja used this knowledge to his benefit and got him six times in five matches when he came to India. The series results too were heavy. England lost to Bangladesh for the first time in a Test match and then India beat them 4-0 in a 5-match series. They lost twice by an innings after putting up 400+ scores. His captaincy stint ended just as it started, on tours to India. The results, though, could not have been more different.