There are some fairly rubbish records in cricket these days. Forgettable milestones, duff gongs, empty laurels: these are all, understandably, a function of cricket's ongoing moneying-over, the need to enshrine new and definitive standards of wonderfulness. The IPL now records, with fevered bombast, the number of times a player has reached 30, while during England's one-day series against Pakistan in the United Arab Emirates it was possible to be crowned man of the match, performer of the match, most entertaining player of the match and also sweet and salty performer of the match, an award presumably for something strikingly bitter-sweet, a moment of joy and pain mixed together, like being stabbed in the eye by the woman you love.

In a time of vaulting hyperbole it seems appropriate it should be Test cricket that looks all set to provide a record that, while widely flagged, has still flown a little under the radar. With England due to announce their squad for the opening Test of the summer against West Indies, and with the tourists having spent the last few days "acclimatising" to the sadism-cricket of late spring by contracting trench foot in assorted outlying paddy fields, it is perhaps the right time to dwell for a moment on one of the summer's key subplots: the race to become the first Englishman to score 23 Test hundreds, a mark that is likely to be passed this season by Kevin Pietersen or – at a long shot – Alastair Cook.

This is the grandest of English cricket's records, if only because the current mark of 22 was set in 1939 by Walter Hammond and has only ever been equalled (most recently by Geoffrey Boycott). Plus there is a sense of late-blooming dramatic tension to the pursuit, given that at one point it looked as though at a push four members of the England top six might end up ploughing carelessly past this most stately of records en masse like a high-powered yacht party, leaving the barnacled skeletons of Hammond, Gooch and Cowdrey drenched in their mocking scurf.

The briefly insatiable Ian Bell 2.0 has since stalled. As has Andrew Strauss whose game has dwindled from the minimalist – the back-foot clump, the wasp-swat pull – to the essentially nonexistent, leaving him now occupying a more or less ceremonial role, emerging like Captain Bird's Eye beaming and twinkling at the top of the order and then abruptly clearing off while everybody else gets on with making fish fingers.

And so we have dwindled to a contrasting duopoly: Cook and Pietersen. Or more likely Pietersen and Cook, as it is the lovable dufus-king of England's middle order who leads the way on 20 to Cook's 19. Momentum is with him too: Pietersen has played a match-winning innings in four of his past seven international matches, regaining a loose-limbed happiness in his late pomp that was absent during the lost years of faux-serious Middle Pietersen.

In the meantime Cook's progress has congealed a little. Take away his sole Test (double) hundred since he was appointed ODI captain this time last year and he's averaging 26 in his past nine matches. A retrenchment is occurring, a process of adjustment, but at precisely the wrong moment as far as the race to 23 is concerned. Pietersen will, in all likelihood, be a deserving winner at some stage later this summer. In spite of which – and sorry, Kev – it is still to be hoped that Cook the tortoise can creep up on Pietersen's shoulder and snatch it at the last.

A preference for Cook might seem a little perverse: of the two he is clearly the roundhead, Oliver Cromwell to Pietersen's prancing King Charles I. Where KP has a balletic gymnasticism in his batting, Cook takes guard like a man about to endure, majestically, some inflicted impertinence, carrying with him at the wicket a sense of epic colonial resistance, like a baked and wilting beefeater still propped wincingly upright while those around him swoon.

There are of course shared virtues. Like Cook, Pietersen is a team player, a diligent practiser, a technician (yes: really) who likes to theorise on "pure batting". His tempo alone is a function of victory: where Cook has made much of scoring Daddy hundreds, these tend to be the hundreds of a gout-ridden Victorian patriarch, whereas Pietersen's are flashy-uncle hundreds, the kind of hundreds that pull the clutch in, take a swig from the hip flask and freewheel all the way downhill into the wedding marquee.

This is not – repeat not – a South African thing. But it is still essentially provenance that dictates Cook must win the race to 23. The fact is, you just can't make another Pietersen. He is a glorious improbability, a treat, a foundling genius. But you might be able to make another Cook, a great talent but also demonstrably a product of school, academy, Under-19s and the crabbed limitations of the mulch-ridden English summer. A birth certificate alone is of no structural interest (Strauss for example is a wholly English cricketer). But Cook is redolently English in the only way that really matters in international sport, specifically his ability to be replicated. His success says: something is right here. Do it again. The system, via multifarious tweaks and fiddles and judgment calls, is just about working.

These are occasionally difficult times for Test cricket but it is a tribute to the occasional verve of the last decade that two English batsmen are closing on that old curmudgeon of a centuries record. When it does go there will be temptation to define an era by the identity of the man who takes it. It ought to be Cook. But you get the batting geniuses you deserve and the coronation of the delightful, enduringly sui generis Super Kev will perhaps have a more accurate tale to tell.