Alastair Cook on life after cricket: ‘I’d forgotten how much I hate interviews.’

Alastair Cook sits down and begins the chat by saying: ‘I’d forgotten how much I hate interviews.’

It wasn’t what was expected from the former England captain on a first meeting with him. While he was known for a steely determination in his playing days, he also seemed the type to be relentlessly polite and unlikely to be unsettled by much, certainly not by a bit of media work.

To be clear, he was polite, he was just brutally honest after a handful of interviews had sparked a memory of countless questions on team selection, form, opponents’ strengths and weaknesses, pitches, weather and everything else a high profile cricketer is asked about on repeat for a couple of decades.

So when he declared his hatred for these kind of ‘uninspiring’ interviews, all those questions were quickly scrubbed from a notebook on the table and attention turned to how life is treating him now, as he finds himself in the media, commentating and podcasting.

‘I didn’t really know how life would evolve after playing cricket,’ Cook told Metro, speaking at the launch of The Overlap and Betfair’s Stick to Cricket show. ‘I had a feeling to try and experience as many things as I could, go one way and another, and see what fits my life. At the minute, I’ve really enjoyed commenting on cricket and watching cricket and still really feeling involved in the game, because it’s a big thing in my life.

‘It’s also all I’m an expert in, really. You spend years playing it, and my knowledge on certain things about cricket and performing under pressure is more than other people’s. So I’ve really enjoyed it.

‘What happens in the future…I’m definitely at the stage where I’m content and you hear other people… I wouldn’t say struggle with not playing cricket, but certainly it’s such a change that it does take a while to find your feet and you have good days, bad days and all that stuff, but I certainly am happy with what I’m doing. But never rule out a career change at some stage.’

Cook is actually an expert in another field as he works on the family farm in Bedfordshire, but it is cricket that has really consumed him for most of his life. It also quickly became clear why he didn’t want to talk so much about batting positions and bowling attacks, because he was in philosophical mood.

‘I don’t know that much about many other things at all and there’s nothing wrong with that,’ he said. ‘I just think you end up committing so much as a player to being the best you can be. I certainly did. I sacrificed a lot, and I wouldn’t change anything. I wouldn’t change any of my career.

‘Of course you have regrets on certain things because that’s just a natural thing. You wish you’d never nicked off as much or made certain decisions, but I made the decisions as a captain as what I thought was the best thing for the side at the time. I can look back at that and be quite proud of that and I think I became the best version of myself as a player and a leader.

‘Whether I was or not, you can never actually answer that question, but you can be content with what you do. I look back with great fondness. I look now and I had such a good time playing. Good, bad, average. I realised how lucky I was to do it. I look at the lads and think, make sure you do take it in, but I do know how hard it is.

‘I understand that it’s so easy to say to take it in, it’s the best time of your life, but when you wake up on that Test morning and you’re under strain and pressure, you’ve got to embrace that, but it’s not easy. That’s why any elite sport or anything elite is not easy. So certainly, I look back with great fondness, but I don’t now look back and I wish I was out there. You have to accept that the game moves on and you’re not quite as good as you want to be.

‘Although obviously when you finish, people think you’re a lot better player than you actually are.’

Cook was captain of England for over four years and became the country’s greatest run-scorer (since overtaken by Joe Root) thanks to his brilliance at the top of the order.

Given his immense career and the way he speaks about the game, he seems an obvious man to go to if current players are searching for advice, but he says it is rare that he is answering his phone to England stars looking to lean on his wisdom.

‘No, to be honest, not really current players,’ Cook says. ‘Clearly if we bump into each other and chat and stuff, but not…they’re in such good hands and most people have their own people they chat to.

‘Rooty or Stokes, if we chat, we do end up talking about cricket because that’s naturally just what we do.’

Could he be something of an untapped resource for players? ‘Yes, but life at the minute with three children, the farm, commentator, new podcast, you can’t do everything. I think that life is always about life. You weigh up the positives and the negatives of doing anything. I think in life, you try and do that. It’s such a hard balance to get right and you just hope you make the right decision at the right time.’

A question of balance was still on the notebook, lurking near the uninspiring cricket queries, and Cook remained in philosophical mood, as he allowed himself to answer in a way he probably couldn’t have done in his playing days.

What would have happened if the current all-out-attack Bazball era had come to the England Test side while he was at his peak as a far more circumspect, but extremely effective opening batsman?

‘You know, the beauty of it is, there are questions you don’t have to worry about the answer to,’ he said. ‘You don’t even get stressed out because you think modern life’s stressful enough. I don’t have to worry about it.

‘And that’s half the fun, isn’t it? That’s for other people to question what Ben Stokes would have done. You can ask him that question. I would have done what I would have done and if he wanted it…that’s what selection is. I don’t have to worry about it. It’s a question people have asked before and I can’t be arsed to go through it.’

That last line was illustrative of a fascinating conversation as Cook was not the statesmanlike figure you might expect, but someone free from the discipline and sacrifices of his playing days, with feelings to get off his chest and wanting to express himself more than he did during the stoic mental warfare of Test cricket.

‘I actually really enjoyed that,’ he said as he got up to leave what appeared to be something of a cathartic experience.

Betfair are set for a big summer and winter of cricket, launching a new show with The Overlap: Stick to Cricket. Don’t miss the first episode next week, where the team will be reviewing the opening test of the series between England and India.