"Six thousand runs is a long way away. It was set by an incredibly talented genius. I'm no genius and Tendulkar is, so that is a long way ahead,” Alastair Cook said in June 2016 as he became the 12th player ever to go past the 10,000-run milestone in Tests.

He was 31 years old then and had age on his side. Plus, he was fit and the hunger to score was intact. Sachin Tendulkar’s mountainous feat of 15,921 Test runs was well within sight. Both Ian Botham and Sunil Gavaskar entertained this possibility. In fact, Cook was five months younger when he breached the landmark than what Tendulkar had been when he achieved the same.