Dear Alastair

Dear Alastair baby (please note our respectful resistance to over-familiar, girly variations such as Ally or Ali),

For ball-obsessed Brits who refuse to worship at the altar of the Great God Effball, this is the best time of year by far. A time when you can read the Times during Wimbledon fortnight - from the back, natch - and pore over seven pages worth of stories about tennis and cricket before finding a single one featuring the words "foul", "straight red" or "Mourinho" in even approximate proximity. How wondrously apt that that small-ball biffer Rory McIlroy has probably scuppered his prospects of winning our impending Open Championship by damaging an ankle "playing soccer".

Better yet - depending on how you steer the ship over the coming stormy seas - this effball-free holiday could go on for a reassuringly long time. Or even a month. So please heed our heartfelt advice: don't thank your lucky stars too much that gnarly old Rhino has hung up his horn, or concern yourself unduly that over the next seven weeks the entire future of the world's finest game in these splintered islands - i.e. five-day cricket - is at stake. And don't blow it. But no pressure.

Anyway, there we were, millions of folk from Land's End to John O'Groats, indulging in that quaint old custom known as "browsing newsagents' shelves while buying milk", when our attention was drawn to the cover of the Radio Times. Or more specifically, your handsome features, hexagonal jawline and salted caramel eyes.

Who pays for broadcast schedules these days, right? Then again, how could we possibly forego checking out what happened the day you - billed somewhat unkindly as "every inch the modern, polished, pampered pro" - were interviewed by Yoda, aka John Michael Brearley, the chap with a degree in people? Bet it was vastly more nerve-wracking meeting him than the heir to the throne.

As we flicked inside, there were the two of you, side by side, next to the Radio Times cover from June 1978 and its full-page snapshot of Yoda wearing a cap, a smirk and a plunging, inverted pyramid of a chin whose sole purpose is to be stroked at leisure. You with that toothy smile-for-the-camera, hands on hips and gaze unflinching; him the silvery-haired, bespectacled, sprightly seer peering down with a mixture of professorial inquisitiveness, bemusement and sheer terror. Was it a rat scuttling across the floor? The sight of Phil Edmonds' hairless scalp bobbing up the stairs? Or perhaps the proportion of G in an approaching G&T? As with Shane Warne's zooter and Brad Hogg's longevity, some mysteries are worth preserving.

In many ways, that gentle session at Lord's told us little we didn't know. Yoda hurled down lengthy, discursive, philosophical bouncers that occasionally wound up where the sun doesn't shine and went on far longer than almost all your answers put together. You still appear to have no regrets about giving up university for cricket, and remarkably few over being dumped for the W**** C**. After all, this did allow you a precious month off to relax, regenerate, reassess and re-focus, not to mention change Elsie's nappies.

Nor were we the least bit taken aback, when Yoda tried to bring up You-Know-Who, to find you leaning forward, guiding the googly past point. If "we probably don't need to drag it up again" isn't the sweetest, most genteel alternative to "Eff off back to your bloody psychotherapist's couch, you old codger", we don't know what is. And when the old codger promptly dragged it up again, you played back with the deadest of bats and smothered the spin.

So, do you really have, as that Radio Times article suggested, "the toughest job in British sport"? It's devilishly hard to think of a tougher one. Managing Manchester United post-Sir Alex must be up there, ditto being the president of the Union Cycliste Internationale post-Lance Liestrong. Then again, neither Louis van Gaal nor Brian Cookson ever has to flex a muscle to fulfil his duties, much less tackle a Mitchell Johnson bouncer, a Davy Warner sledge or a Michael Vaughan tweet.

And that's why, for all the slip-ups and cock-ups, and despite that horrendously depressing Christmas you lumbered us with in 2013, you still command our compassion, our patience and our affection. Of course we know how tough it is being you. Of course we know how fickle we can be, how hypercritical, how hysterical, how ungracious. Of course we might not be so supportive if national captains could still learn the ropes with their counties, or if an obvious, ready-to-use successor was snapping at your heels (honestly, we really wouldn't mind if you stepped down to focus on climbing Mount Tendulkar). Indeed, one of your chief duties this summer is to give the selectors no excuse whatsoever for contaminating Rooty's boyish joie de vivre with the onerous burdens of coin-tossing and media-parrying.

We know you don't subscribe to the Graham Thorpe Theory of Media Relativity (don't read/listen to the honeyed words if you can't cope with the critical ones). Otherwise, you could never have told Yoda about your contempt for the trolls and Twitterati. Your heroic articulacy bears repeating: "You can be sitting in your lounge, and you've had a really good day, and even if you scored 100, someone could still write to you and say, 'That was the worst 100 I ever saw - what the hell are you doing?' Basically they stand at your door, throw s**t at you and walk away with no consequences whatsoever."

On behalf of the s**t thr*wers and c*ap ch*ckers in our midst, we apologise unreservedly. Well, almost. We're still not sure we've entirely forgiven you for helping usher You-Know-Who towards the exit, let alone being the most reluctant declarer since William Brown, Geoffrey Cuthbertson and Robert Nelson took turns to guide Northamptonshire to 99 consecutive winless County Championship matches between 1935 and 1939. On the whole, nonetheless, we'd rather paraphrase Peter Gabriel: "It's only knock and knowall, but we like it."

Yet what impressed us most was the way you seemed so willing to contradict yourself. At one point you told Yoda that, as captain, "you have to do it your own way and be natural all the time". Yet you also stated that England and Bosstralia have "a responsibility to the game" and "a great opportunity to make a real statement about how we should play cricket".

Forgive us for being a teensy bit sceptical about such familiar phoney-war proclamations, but frankly, and with all due respect, Alastair Cook being "natural all the time" strikes us as a recipe for disaster. As bandleader in that Lord's victory over New Zealand, you liberated and emboldened, supplying the ideal environment for free spirits such as Rooty, Stokesy, Woody and Buttlery to strut their singular stuff: more Miles Davis than your usual Joe Loss. Headingley was another matter, but being unnatural suits you, truly.

We feel for you, we really do. Deep down, you know that this series, despite your extensive record-scuttling, could define your career. Not only have you never performed, run-wise, in a home Ashes, you know even better than we do that, ludicrous as it may seem, defeat in this one would leave your legacy in tatters - even though you're already up there with David Gower and Douglas Jardine as one of only three England captains to have won an Ashes rubber and a series in India. So how's this for motivation? A second home Ashes win as glorious leader would put you up there with Yoda himself.

However, completing that mission-not-impossible-but-bloody-tricky, as you well know, will be more about means than ends. How do you ensure your team not only continue to capture our imagination in the way Cap'n Morgan's mob did, but jail it for life without the remotest possibility of parole or even an annual weekend off for good behaviour?

Pardon us, then, for offering a shove in the general vicinity of the right direction. Which means - and we're frightfully sorry for labouring the point - carrying on being unnatural. No, not at the crease (though we're sure Goochie's been banging on for yonks about trying the occasional straight drive), but in master-strategist, self-esteem-bolstering, man-management ways. Such as asking Lord Botham to regale the troops with some ribald anecdotes last weekend. That nobody, apparently, missed practice the next day underlined how courageous and brilliant a stroke that was.

So please consider the following follow-ups:

Yours fingers-crossedly,

The Great British Public