Книга: The Autobiography (Cook Alastair); Penguin, 2020

Watch. The. Ball.

It's just you. Standing at the crease. Waiting. The bowler is running. His arm swinging. The ball - 155 grams of cork, string and leather - is hurled at you. At 90 mph it travels 22 yards in under half a second. You can barely see it and you've got to be swinging your bat before it's halfway towards you. Because you are in its path . . .

Alastair Cook, one of England's most decorated players and highest test run scorer, knows what it is like to be your best under pressure. Yet at 33 he called time on his England career.

Come with him as he relives the fraught hours on the pitch, the desperate lows and astonishing highs, the paralysing anxiety that can send the best back home and the extraordinary battle of wills with yourself, the opposing players and even those supposedly on your own side.

This is cricket as you've never seen it. The view from the inside . . .