Ashes 2015: 'The challenge is sticking to our new game under pressure,' says Alastair Cook

Captain returns to face Australia relishing the recent enthusiasm generated by England team and keen to work with new coach Trevor Bayliss

England captain Alistair Cook (Getty Images)

Less than two weeks to go and Alastair Cook was relaxed, urbane and realistic. He has been through the mill to make it this far as England captain. Whatever happens in the Ashes series, which starts on 8 July, can hardly be worse than what has befallen him and his team in the last 15 months.

Yet, now in the nick of time, just as Australia were about to set foot on these shores, ready to perform a kind of ritual slaughter, the mood has shifted. The disconsolate shadow which had enveloped the team and the game in general has been replaced by sunshine. Down on his farm, Cook has been ploughing on air.

“I thought it was a fantastic one-day series against New Zealand,” he said at Lord’s. “Seeing the effect the Test matches had on the public – I can only say what people said to me – they enjoyed watching the Test matches against New Zealand and then hitting form straight away in the one-dayers by scoring 400 at Edgbaston. It went from there. Everyone I spoke to said how good it was to see. There was a real feel-good factor about English cricket.

“You only have to walk down the street, and I think that’s what’s inspiring this side at the moment. The support we’re getting from people is a different kind of support from what I have ever experienced throughout my eight or nine years. That general optimism and excitement about English cricket hasn’t happened before.”

It has been caused by two crucial factors: style and substance. England have played this season in an unfamiliar fashion, managing to ally a regally entertaining audacity with a (partially) winning formula.

Disappointingly pegged back in the brief Test series against New Zealand, they came rumbustiously from 2-1 behind in the one-dayers to defeat the World Cup finalists 3-2.

Cook has watched or listened to the latter part of this from the farm, where he lives with his wife and family, or in the Essex dressing room. It was possible to discern that, from this distance, he too saw the vast change for what it was and has been heartened by it. England are having fun again. It is as if they are playing a game.

But all this was against a New Zealand team determined to entertain and to do so with a smile. No one, incidentally, should mistake this for being a soft touch. But still, Australia are different. They will not be smiling much, unless they are laughing at their own jokes.

These tourists are also relentless and driven about this series in a way that the Kiwis could not be. Australia will not stop until the last gasp. They will make it damnably difficult for England to provide either style or substance. Cook is determined that it can continue.

“I think we can,” he said. “The challenge of that is sticking true to that under the pressure of a bigger series. No disrespect to New Zealand but the Ashes is more high-profile. With the group of players we have, it suits us. People like Mo Ali, Jos Buttler, Ben Stokes, Joe Root, they are looking to take the attack to the opposition and that’s when they play their best. We want to see people do that.

“The fifth day at Lord’s against New Zealand was one of the great days of English cricket. The walk-up crowd, the noise when we took those wickets was fantastic and the support we’ve had this summer backed up by some pretty good cricket, there’s no reason why we can’t do it. I think people have enjoyed the fact that there’s been slightly more aggressive cricket.”

England embark on a four-day training camp in Spain on Saturday. There they will design strategy and approach. They – but particularly Cook – will also get to know their new coach, the Australian Trevor Bayliss, who arrived in England on Thursday. Cook met him for the first time in the Tavern Stand at Lord’s just before he gave this interview.

“The relationship with the coach is massive,” said Cook. “I’ll spend a lot of time with him, I think the guys will spend a lot of time with him. That’s the most important thing. The guys have played a lot of cricket, done a lot of training, been pretty much non-stop since the start of the Windies tour. I think it is about meeting Trevor, talking about what will happen over the next seven weeks.

“You need to have the captain and coach totally aligned. Paul Farbrace, our assistant coach who knows Trevor well and had worked with him, will play a big role in this relationship to start with. We can’t pretend it’s ideal meeting the coach for the first time a week before the Ashes but I remember turning up to India after the bombings.

“We had two net sessions and [Andrew] Strauss got back-to-back hundreds. We did lose the game but played some really good cricket for four days. I was using that analogy to show that you can overcome a lack of preparation, it can be an exciting and different way of doing things.”

What Bayliss might lack in knowledge of his own team is compensated for by a deep understanding of Australia’s players. Only last winter, he stood in to coach their Twenty20 squad. But Cook mused that he might also spot things in England’s team – “the little two per centers, did you know this is what other people have been thinking of you?” Combined with the keenest coaching credentials, this might give England an edge they would not have had.

Bayliss may also be able to tell England a thing or two about the innate Australian tactic of sledging, which appears to run along the lines of if in doubt, sledge. England have not been angelic in this regard, though trying to go tongue to tongue with some of the Australians is inadvisable. Cook suspects this, too, has changed in his team.

He said: “The way we play cricket, sledging and stuff, we have to do what is authentic to us as a side but we have all taken a big lesson over what happened over the last five weeks. No matter how much cricket you have played, you are always learning. The way that both sides conducted themselves in that series was a refreshing approach and everyone enjoyed that. We can only control what we control. It is part of what we will talk about at the camp.”

For Cook to have made this Spanish camp as captain of England is remarkable in itself. There were times throughout last year, following the disastrous tour of Australia, when he might have gone. But he pulled through, the form returned, he has become England’s leading run scorer. The challenge remains but the weight has lifted.

Without giving anything away about his team, Cook seemed to intimate that he knew which XI he would prefer to start the series – that which lost to New Zealand at Headingley. But he gave glowing reports of both the left-arm speedster, Mark Footitt, and the leg spinner, Adil Rashid. He thinks that an England win would be a finer thing than in 2013.

“If we did win the Ashes at The Oval that would be a remarkable achievement. It would be my best achievement,” he said.

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