ALASTAIR COOK seems to give the lie to the idea that all young people are concerned about is looking good and living life in a hurry. The England opener, who turns 23 on Christmas Day, never worries about how ungainly he appears at the crease or how slowly he scores.

Temperamentally, he is far more at home with cricket's most traditional format, the five-day Test match, than Twenty20, its latest fast-food format designed to appeal to the new generation.

Thank goodness, those in the visitors' dressing-room would have been saying at the end of the first day of the second Test at the Sinhalese Sports Club. Without Cook's immense patience, England really would have had a miserable time.

At the start of this tour, Michael Vaughan had stressed to his batsmen that they could not expect to score hundreds in four hours in Sri Lanka as they might in England. The accuracy of the bowling, the slow nature of the pitches, and the heat and humidity, were likely to ensure that a hundred took far nearer to seven hours. This sort of sermon was right up Cook's street.

After the miseries of Kandy, where he fell in the first over of each innings to Chaminda Vaas, a left-arm swing bowler of the type that had caused him problems in the home series against India, Cook was only ever going to be ultra-cautious here. For hour after hour, it seemed, the former school choirboy of distinction searched in vain for the correct notes.

Early on, while Vaughan himself was failing to practice what he had preached by going along faster than a runaway train, Cook might easily have fallen once more to Vaas, but on eight his edged stroke drew two slip fielders into attempting the catch; one distracted the other.

It concerned Cook not a jot, nor did it when he survived a close lbw appeal from Lasith Malinga on 42. Few England openers of the modern age have been quite as phlegmatic as Cook. Michael Atherton provides perhaps the nearest parallel. Before him Geoff Boycott. So Cook is perfectly made for the foundation-laying exercise that alone builds the big totals that wins Test matches on the subcontinent.

Cook was happy just to keep out Vaas and the other fast bowlers but he was actually quite enterprising at times against Muttiah Muralitharan, without ever going mad. He worked him into the gaps and hit him for half of his eight boundaries, but never swept him, just as he never swept him in England last year. He kept risks to the minimum.

For most of the day, Cook's score hung apologetically behind the number of overs bowled. That is truly Boycottian progress. It is very rare in this fast-scoring age for opening batsmen to spend all day at the crease and to not have reached their century by stumps. But that would surely have happened with Cook had he not been adjudged leg- before for 81 in the 83rd over of the day, and the third over with the second new ball.

Cook was unlucky. Replays clearly showed that the ball would have swung down the leg side, but Malinga's late swing had not only beaten Cook's bat, but umpire Daryl Harper's senses. Cook's concentration may have been broken by a call of nature a few minutes earlier, when he held up play to visit the bathroom. Such things happen in these parts.

Cook knew his team desperately needed him to make a century, and a big one at that, but he would have desperately wanted one for himself too, to improve his already impressive tally of six Test hundreds. Sachin Tendulkar and Don Bradman, on eight, share the record for most Test hundreds under the age of 23. A seventh hundred here would have left Cook standing equal with Javed Miandad.

Already in this series, Ian Bell (twice), Vaughan and now Cook have passed 70 but failed to reach 100. This is one of the reasons England are losing the series. They need Paul Collingwood, on 49 overnight, to put that right on the second day if a challenging total is to be posted. As for the indefatigable Cook, he'll be eyeing up the second innings.