Alastair Cook’s England cricket team have just won a Test series against India in one of the most unlikely comebacks of the sporting year. But only a month ago, fans and former players were demanding he resign. He tells Emma John what changed

There was a moment, last month, when Alastair Cook knew that his sporting career had reached its lowest point. The England team he led was crumbling to defeat against India at Lord’s. This was their seventh Test defeat in nine matches, and a quiet numbness crept over the dressing room. “There was just a gradual descent into silence,” recalls Cook.

It was more than just losing a match. For the past year, he’d had to endure a level of scrutiny and scepticism that only attaches itself to government leaders and England cricket captains. He was the first England captain to lose the Ashes in seven years, and he’d done so in humiliating fashion, a 5-0 whitewash. Now he was losing matches at home, his tactical abilities were being torn apart by pundits and the public, and to make it worse, his own batting scores read like lottery numbers.

Cook left the ground and drove to the Bedfordshire farm where he lives with his wife Alice. “It’s quite nice to switch off and not see anything to do with cricket,” he says. He told Alice he was thinking of quitting the captaincy – “bared his soul”, as he later put it. And Alice, the sensible, practical farmer’s daughter who has been his companion since his school years, talked him out of it.

Three weeks later, he is sitting in the pavilion at the Kia Oval, surprisingly relaxed while talking about his summer of horror. He’s 29 and still looks youthful, although the freshly laundered whites he’s wearing might play their part. His square jaw looks softer today, and the big eyes less doleful, than they can be on TV. It is just before the final Test match of the summer and England are 2-1 up, having routed the opposition in the past two games. It has been an extraordinary, and rapid, turnaround. What went right?

“A lot of us were fighting for our futures really,” shrugs Cook. “Maybe it was just a clear-out of our minds, saying, ‘It can’t get any worse.’” Cook looks out of the window onto the pitch, where the Indian team are practising. He knows the story’s not over: his summer will be judged on the outcome of this final Test. “We have to win this series now,” he says, and his face flashes serious, a hint of what it might be like to be under his command.

His leadership has been the subject of speculation, ridicule and endless attacks from Shane Warne (“negative”, “boring” and “horrific” are just some of the words used by Warne to describe “the worst captaincy I have ever seen”). Successful sporting captains tend to have an almost psychic acumen, infectious charisma, or the kind of daring that’s known in changing rooms as “bloody big balls”. The best combine all three. And it’s true that, watching Cook courteously deliver media pleasantries at the end of each game, one might wonder which of these it is that inspires his team – there’s nothing about him that suggests a killer edge. Even today he just seems too, well, nice.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A dejected Cook after the loss at the Ashes during day five of the Third Test at the WACA ground, Perth, Australia. Photograph: Anthony Devlin/PA

What is it like in those lonely moments in the field, when he knows that the eyes of the world – not to mention a vocal regiment of players-turned-pundits in the TV commentary box – are judging him? Does he feel the weight of the decisions he’s making? “You feel it when it’s going badly,” he nods, “and you feel helpless from being able to stop it, really. You try everything.” He wishes, he says half-jokingly, that he had a microphone link-up to the press box. “Because you could say, ‘Well I’m trying this.’ And if they understand the reason you’re trying to do it, it would probably be better explained.”

One man who does understand, and refused to join in with the demands for his resignation, was his former team-mate, now Test Match Special summariser, Graeme Swann, who says they first met when Cook was a “drippingly wet behind the ears youngster” at the national cricket academy in Loughborough. “The greatest thing I can say about him, and what makes him a good captain, is that he’s got the most stubborn streak of any man I’ve ever known. It’s the reason he doesn’t buckle under the pressure. He refuses to ever admit that he’s wrong in an argument and that’s where the two of us spend most of our time. We’ve had huge ding- dongs.”

And while some have been about cricket – they once went 20 minutes without speaking, over chicken wings at an ice rink in Dubai, when England’s batting collapsed against Pakistan – the most memorable, for Swann, was about Paul Gascoigne’s knee injury in the 1991 FA Cup Final. “Alastair and Jimmy Anderson were swearing that he immediately had to leave the field,” laughs Swann. “But I knew he’d collapsed at the restart. When I was proved right I’ve never seen a sicker looking individual in my life,” laughs Swann.

The fondness with which Swann talks about Cook could also be seen in the crowds this summer. Even as his stock as captain plummeted, there remained demonstrable affection for the man himself. At the Ageas Bowl, in the Test following the Lord’s disaster, Cook was cheered to the wicket. “The reception when I walked out at Southampton is something I’ll remember for ever,” says Cook, shaking his head in wonderment. “I was surprised, to be honest with you.”

He ended up batting for five hours and making his highest score since May 2013, but he stalled in the 90s and was out five runs short of a century that would have been his first in over a year. Was he thinking how good it would be, to prove people wrong? “I wasn’t thinking of looking good,” he says. “I was just so desperate to finally contribute.” Being a perfectionist, it still bothers him – “I was just gutted for myself, on a selfish note” – but it was the beginning of a turn in fortune, and opinion: from Dire Straits to AC and The Sunshine Band. “I’m not the first cricket captain to experience that, and I certainly won’t be the last.”

The England captaincy has historically been something of a poisoned chalice. From the mid-1980s to 2005 what should have been the ultimate honour for any cricketer was more of a curse. Star players – Ian Botham, David Gower, Graham Gooch – found themselves on the losing side. Young bucks with big dreams – Mike Atherton, Nasser Hussain – watched their hopes steadily erode, and age quicker than a second-term prime minister. If you were Mike Gatting, you managed to win and still end up leaving in disgrace.

Then English cricket changed. There were Ashes victories and open-top bus parades; England were officially ranked the best team in the world, and their exploits shamed the continuing underachievement of their footballing peers. A team that had been, for 20 years, the whipping boy of the British sports pages had become odds-on favourites in every series they began, and being their captain was a high rank indeed.

So last winter’s 5-0 defeat to Australia came as a brutal shock. When Giles Clarke, the chairman of English cricket, was asked to sum up England’s performances that season he called them “appalling” and “unacceptable”. But he also added an unexpected endorsement of Cook. “He is a very determined guy, a very good role model,” said Clarke, “and he and his family are very much the sort of people we want the England captain and his family to be.”

There’s certainly something a bit Terence Rattigan about his background. He grew up in the Essex village of Wickham Bishops, his mum a teacher from Swansea, his dad a telecoms engineer. His parents loved sport of all kinds, and Alastair and his two brothers had a regular diet of it – badminton on Mondays, short tennis on Tuesdays, long tennis on Wednesdays. “It was my mum and dad’s 40th wedding anniversary over the last weekend, and they’d got a bit of old footage out of me – aged five, pads up to my chest, and gardening gloves on,” smiles Cook. “Older brother bowling, younger brother fielding.” He pauses. “I do feel sorry for my younger brother, he used to field a lot.”

Until he was 13, Cook was a chorister at St Paul’s Cathedral School; his musical training earned him a scholarship to Bedford School and was crucial to the development of his concentration on the cricket field. “He had to sing difficult music in an adult world where errors were devastating,” says Andrew Morris, Bedford School’s then director of music. He was also, adds Morris, “a thoroughly decent and charming young man”.

He must have been the kind of pupil that makes the less gifted groan – handsome, talented and breaking all the school’s batting records. His endeavours on the cricket field meant that even teams who hadn’t played Bedford knew who Cook was, and what he was likely to do to them. Did he manage to keep a check on his ego? “I hope I did,” he says, frowning. “I’m sure there were times when as a growing teenager I didn’t.” In fact, he had no idea himself how good he could be. There was no ambition to play for England – the young Cook thought he could “just about be good enough” to play professional cricket for his home county, Essex. “But you hear all those horror stories of people who are amazing at 14 but rubbish at 17, so you always think, ‘I don’t want to be that kid.’”

Even years later, his first appearance for England came as a surprise. It was 2006; England had just won the Ashes for the first time in 18 years, and a 21-year-old Cook was in Antigua playing for England’s development side when his phone rang. Injuries had hit the touring England team, and Cook and his team-mate James Anderson were needed in India, pronto. “I’d never really spoken to Jimmy before but we packed our bags and spent the next three hours on the beach, thinking we might as well make the most of it, because Nagpur doesn’t have too many beaches.” Forty-eight hours later, after three connecting flights, Cook was making his Test debut. He scored a century. “You talk about how life can change in a week…” Cook shakes his head. “You just don’t know.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Cook celebrates with the trophy after winning the Test series, August 2014. Photograph: Jed Leicester/Action Images

After that “life never looked back”, which sounds like a typically Cook-ish piece of understatement. His sporting career has been record-breaking. He scored seven centuries before his 23rd birthday, the only Englishman to do so. Between 2010 and 2012 he scored so many centuries that people started comparing him to the legendary Don Bradman. The most Test runs scored by an Englishman is 8,900, a record held by his mentor, Graham Gooch – and there seems no question that Cook, currently on 8,423, will overhaul it.

Wielding power has not come as naturally, however, as carrying his bat. He admits he is not a confrontational sort – “my wife finds it hard because I never really argue” – and when he first took over the captaincy he found it difficult to handle differences of opinion within the team. “I found dealing with my close friends the hardest bit, because I respect them and that’s why we’re friends,” he says. He points to Swann as an example. “I’m not saying that we fell out or anything like that. But he’s a great bowler and he had very strong opinions, so it was hard to change them.”

Perhaps it’s the wood panelling and leather furnishings of the committee room, but there seems something timelessly English about Cook – the inclination to kindness, the imperturbable demeanour, the quiet way he wears authority. He puts his unrufflable nature down to his role as an opening batsman. “You have to be very pragmatic, because you walk out to bat at the best time to bowl, with a brand new ball, against the best bowlers, who are fresh. And their job is to get you out, so when you fail there’s no point beating yourself up.” A physiological quirk that means he doesn’t sweat – even under a 40-degree Australian sun – adds to the effect.

As well as withstanding the heat of the past few months, he’s had to handle the emotional demands of new fatherhood. Even though his two- month-old, Elsie, is “a well-travelled baby”, Cook has missed a lot of her early days. “You see how much she’s changed every week,” he says. “I do feel sorry for Al because when I’m at home I’m trying to recover, so in the middle of the night I’m not the keenest to get out of bed.”

Around the time of his Lord’s nadir, his sister-in-law got married. Cook had been asked to play his saxophone at the wedding, and he lights up on telling the story: “All the families were there,” he beams, “and I’ve never been more nervous, even at my own wedding.” The same passion evident in his batting animates the conversation as he talks about music – practising, sight-reading, rediscovering one’s embouchure. It’s like there’s a different Cook in the room – not the considered one who presents himself dutifully to the cameras at the end of a day’s play, but the one who shares a game-playing life with 10 other blokes in a dirty, boisterous changing room.

Four days after we talk, England have won the final Test, and the series. They beat India at the Oval in only three days – their third comprehensive, ruthless victory in a row. No one looked prouder, or happier, than Captain Cook. Like his namesake, he had weathered the storms, steered his team through adversity, and made it safely to new waters. “It is tough when you go through it,” he says. “But even when it is going bad – and it can’t have gone any worse over the last six months – you’re still playing cricket for England .

“Even when every Tom, Dick and Harry was calling for my head, I still felt I could get better at being captain. And I still think I will get better. And that’s probably what kept me going. If I went now, I’d still have some burning questions in my mind. Not many people are ever called England captain, so why would you just throw it away unless you know that you’ve given it everything?”

Investec, the specialist bank and asset manager, is the title sponsor of Test match cricket in England (investec.co.uk/cricket and @InvestecCricket)

Alastair Cook Photograph: Pål Hansen for the Observer/Pål Hansen