He has played his career in an era where both the quality of bowling and pitches have favoured the batsman. Despite all this, this supposedly ATG batsman only averages 46.
Actual ATG batsman, most of whom played in a tougher era, averaged well into the 50s eg Tendulkar, Lara, Ponting, Kallis, Sangakkara, Dravid etc. Cook is comfortably in a league or 2 below these players.
People talk about 11000 runs and 30 centuries but many batsman from countries other than England would easily achieve this had they been given the opportunity to play that many tests.
Take Warner; he has already made 16 centuries in 104 innings, and if he had the chance to play say the 251 innings that Cook did that extrapolates to 39 hundreds. Even with a drop in form it still clears 30.
Younus debuted 6 years before Cook but only played 201 innings - he has still managed 2 more hundreds.
Also, Cook has generally struggled against the few decent pace attacks he has come up against. In his 6 Ashes series he has failed in 4, was mediocre in 1 and outstanding in 1. He has also struggled against the South African pace attack and vs Pak in the 2010 series.
He is a decent/very good player, who plays spin and the short ball well and has excellent concentration but he has serious technical deficiency at the pitched up ball in the corridor of uncertainty. Every batsman will nick off now and then but Cook's head frequently overbalances making him a prime nick off or lbw candidate. Decent bowlers just have to probe in that corridor of uncertainty, and what makes it worse is that cook doesn't cover drive many 4's so doesn't put bowlers under pressure. We have seen the likes of McGrath, Stuart Clarke and Ryan Harris expose this in 3 ashes series.
To conclude he is mentally tough and a good player but nowhere near ATG in terms of technique. The numbers back my view up.
Brilliant post..Sums up nicely.POTW for me.
His struggle vs quality pace attack is pretty visible and if played in some other era he would have found things even worse.
His form goes in and out most of the times unlike other greats who have been far more consistent performers than Cook ever was.
He has longevity and a great record in Asian conditions as his only notable plus point and hence he is not there at ATG level .Was never the best test batsmen in the world as per ICC Rankings and doesn't feature that consistently even in top 10 ranking like his peers .
Yeah, let's ignore the fact that in 24 Tests outside Australia and South Africa, he has only scored 1 hundred (vs PAK in UAE).
In other words: 0 hundreds in 22 matches in England, India, NZ, SL and WI.
Sure he would have overtaken Cook's hundreds/runs tally, but that would only have happened had Australia played cricket at home (that too on flat pitches, we saw Warner struggle vs SA on seaming tracks) or in SA only where the bounce and pace is to his liking.
How can you compare him to Cook who has at various points in his career, performed and scored big in every country and not just 2/3?
In Test cricket, Warner is just a poor man's Sehwag/Hayden. His 'gung-ho' approach works really well on flat, hard pitches, but outside his comfort-zone he doesn't amount to anything.
I thought he has improved but then he toured Sri Lanka last summer and we saw what happened, and I also saw him fail in Australia vs SA last month because the pitches were not flat.
Cook's status as an ATG can be debated, but bringing the likes of Warner into the discussion as a presumed equivalent of Cook is ridiculous. He is not even in the same league in Tests.
No opener has come close to Cook since his debut and for an overseas player, he is remarkably good in Asia and won his team a series in India. In addition, he also won England its first Ashes in Australia in 24 years by scoring more runs than any English batsman in an Ashes series for what, 80 years?
These are the major reasons why some people, including me, rate him as an ATG. Yes he plays a lot of matches, but it takes tremendous powers of concentration to bat longer than anyone else year in year out.
There are many factors/reasons that can be highlighted due to which one might not consider him an ATG and as I said, you make some fair comments, such as his troubles against pacers and technical weaknesses, but you almost ruined your very intelligent post by bringing a clown like Warner into the discussion, who is setting a very wrong precedence for an opener.
