Alastair Cook led England to glory as the English lions defeated the South Africans in their own backyard. Skipper Cook, though, was not fully satisfied with the series victory and said that there was room for further improvement in the team. Cook pointed towards the top order and felt that the batsmen could have contributed more.
“There are still a lot of unanswered questions in our top seven batting,” Cook said. “There are certainly places up for grabs.”The output we’ve had in this series hasn’t been good enough if we’re trying to get to No1 in the world, which is the ultimate aim.”As a batting unit, we’ve relied too heavily on Joe Root, Ben Stokes and Jonny Bairstow. Absolutely we’ve got a room for improvement.” “At the end of the day, results matter and your end column of runs are absolutely vital. So to say they’ve totally convinced me would be wrong,” Cook said.
Discussing England’s loss in the last test, Cook said, “We’ve produced a very limp batting performance. There’s no excuse for that. It’s disappointing for the English supporters to see seven wickets in just over an hour but overall I can’t fault the way the lads have gone on this tour. They’ve played some brilliant cricket.”
“A lot of time, under pressure we produce outstanding performances. This is just a blip and incredibly frustrating.”The dead rubber issue is one I don’t mind having if we’ve just won the series, but it just shows we’ve just still not managed to put a whole series together. I thought we would have made a really big step forward if we had played four good Tests here. We couldn’t quite manage to do it,” Cook concluded.