The career of Alastair Cook has had a rare quality of being able to bend time, or at least perceptions of it. Some days, it feels as if Cook has been around forever.
That will be the feeling when he plays his 100th Test in Perth on Friday.
As a landmark, one hundred Tests no longer carries the heft it once did, but it is still an accurate gauge of longevity.
On other days, it feels like only yesterday that Cook was getting off the plane from the Caribbean that deposited him in Nagpur, where on debut, he hit 60 and an unbeaten 104.
In cricket years, March 2006 does not always feel that long ago.
It is probably this disorientating quality that sometimes means it takes longer for the scale of his achievements to sink in, especially to those outside England.
The achievements are vast, which is not in doubt. He is still two weeks from turning 29, which for a batsman is not so old. He may still have his most productive years ahead of him.
Yet the weight of his numbers – 99 Tests, nearly 8,000 Test runs, 25 hundreds – makes it sound like they should be the work of some wrinkly, grizzled 39 year old who has been around for 15 years and is about to retire.
Imagine how big the numbers might look if he plays another seven or eight years.
At the moment, though, Cook looks as though he has been around too long. England are on the receiving end of what could become, by today, a fearful hiding from Australia.
Cook has not scored runs, England’s batting has been abysmal and the word, true or not, is that they are spooked by Mitchell Johnson’s pace.
In his defence, Cook has not looked out of form exactly.
His dismissal on Sunday, hooking Johnson, might have been the work of a frazzled mind.
It could just as well have been simply poor execution. As an opener, in any case, crease life is a fraught experience and about as fragile as cricketing existence gets. An opener can be in the form of his life, yet still get out early to the conspiring of a hard, swinging new ball, fresh fast bowlers and a lively surface.
When Cook is out of form, be assured it will be crystal clear, because his game can be obvious that way. His head leans over too much when he tries playing through leg; his footwork can get a little iffy and he begins dabbing outside off.
Back in 2010, he was really out of form. In that summer series against Pakistan, he looked terrible and was close to being dropped by the time the third Test at the Oval began.
Three times, early in his second innings, he edged at catchable heights between slips – twice in two balls.
Yet he ended up making 110, an innings fluent enough for it to be his third-fastest innings over a hundred.
How different could his career have looked now had any of those been taken and not gone for a boundary?
Conceivably it could have come to a halt, at least a temporary one, had any of those been taken. Instead, those three balls fetched three boundaries and eventually the hundred.
There is, if you look carefully, a strong flux about Cook’s career. He has had phases of huge bounty, but also some very fallow periods.
Twelve times in his career, he has averaged over 50 in a series, but he has also averaged under 40 as many as 13 times.
That has lately started to reappear within series themselves, where one big score has often camouflaged a series of lower scores. Against India in 2011, for instance, there was a mammoth 294, but five other innings which yielded just 54 runs; a 115 against South Africa in 2012, but just 80 runs in five more innings; 130 against New Zealand earlier this summer, but 87 runs in three other knocks.
It is a bewildering scatter for a man acknowledged – and shown by his overall records – to be such a wolfish run-getter, a curiously intemperate record for such an ostensibly even-tempered man. If it bears repeating that it is partly just the nature of his role as opener, it is equally worth asking where the rest of the explanation lies.
Whatever the equation, the particulars can wait for now. Of far greater urgency for Cook, and England, are his runs, preferably in the quantities he scored last time he was in Australia.
The runs of a batsman-captain form a substantial chunk of what we consider good captaincy.
Cook has shown many times that he is capable of delivering that. Only last winter, he was doing so in India.
He will do it again, too. The problem is identifying when.
osamiuddin@thenational.ae