Alastair Cook: The first Englishman to 10,000 Test runs ends our Christmas countdown
Saturday 24 December 2016 19:51, UK
And so we reach the end of our countdown and who better to round things off than a record-breaking England captain?
At the end of May, Alastair Cook became the first Englishman to reach 10,000 runs in Test cricket and, at 31 years and 157 days, the youngest batsman to reach the milestone in the history of the game.
Having taken the record from none other than Sachin Tendulkar, who scored his 10,000th Test run at the age of 31 years and 326 days, Cook joins The Little Master to become the 12th member of a most exclusive group - Ricky Ponting, Jacques Kallis, Rahul Dravid, Kumar Sangakkara, Brian Lara, Shivnarine Chanderpaul, Mahela Jayawardene, Allan Border, Steve Waugh and Sunil Gavaskar completing the '10,000-run club.'
"It was a very special moment for me," Cook said after achieving the feat during the second Test against Sri Lanka, at the Emirates Riverside.
"The game is not about personal milestones, it's about winning games of cricket for England and scoring the runs that do that. Second to that, there are little milestones along the way. I am proud of that, to be at the top of the order and doing it against the new ball means a lot."
The England skipper, who turns 32 on Christmas Day, has since kicked on again and gone past 11,000 runs. Who knows how many more there are still to come from England's No 1 run-scorer?
