Tea England 281 for 3 (Cook 115*, Collingwood 59*) trail South Africa 343 (Kallis 75, Smith 75) by 62 runs
Alastair Cook produced a performance of limitless concentration and increasing authority to post his tenth Test century in his 50th appearance, and carry England towards a dominant position on the third day of the Boxing Day Test in Durban. By tea, Cook had repelled the second new ball, in partnership with Paul Collingwood, who was 59 not out, to leave England trailing South Africa by just 62 runs with seven wickets still in hand.
It was a timely performance in more ways than one for Cook, who turned 25 on Christmas Day, but entered the match with questions hanging over his contribution to the side, after a tally of two hundreds in the past two calendar years. Resuming on 31 not out overnight, he gritted his teeth and bedded in for the long haul, and made light of the second-over dismissal of his overnight partner, Jonathan Trott, to grind out a solitary run from his first 37 deliveries of the day. Kevin Pietersen came and went before lunch as well, pinned lbw by Paul Harris while sizing up an ambitious sweep, but Cook refused to be drawn into any indiscretions as he inched towards a hundred that he brought up with a clip through midwicket from 218 balls.
Only once did Cook come close to being dislodged, when - on 64 - he successfully overturned an appeal for a catch at short leg off the part-time spin of JP Duminy. Replays suggested, not entirely conclusively, that the deflection had come straight off the pad, but the speed and conviction with which Cook called for the second opinion suggested that justice had been served. Either side of that alarm he was discipline personified - not least against Makhaya Ntini, another player with a point to prove, with whom he played a day-long game of cat-and-mouse, leaving the ball religiously on line as Ntini's natural angle carried all but a handful of deliveries straight across the off stump.
In the final half-hour before lunch, Cook began to open his shoulders and go for his shots, cracking Harris out of the attack with a brace of fours through the off-side, before rocking back in his stance to pull Morne Morkel through square leg. And later, on 88, he latched gleefully onto a wide long-hop from the increasingly lacklustre Harris to surge into the nineties for the first time since the Lord's Test in July. Those moments aside, he dealt exclusively in pushes and deflections, relying on his mental strength to carry him and his team into a position from which England can still pile on the pressure in South Africa's second innings.
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