Harry Brook on course to who knows where in astonishing rise - Chris Waters

No one who has played the sport has scored more than Brook has managed at that stage of a career and as records continue to fall at the feet of the 24-year-old Yorkshireman, one can only ponder how the game and future generations will look back on a man who is raising the bar.

His latest masterwork - an unbeaten 184 at the time of writing as England ended day one of the second Test against New Zealand in Wellington on 315-3 - lifted him above three great West Indians in Frank Worrell, George Headley and Everton Weekes, the Indian maestro Sunil Gavaskar, the Yorkshire batsman Herbert Sutcliffe and the Indian enigma Vinod Kambli and into first place on the “scorer of most runs after nine Test innings” list.

Brook has 807 - nine ahead of Kambli and 27 ahead of Sutcliffe, whose tally included a trio of Ashes hundreds on the 1924-25 tour alongside fellow opener Jack Hobbs.

Full judgement will be reserved, as it invariably must, for Brook’s own output against Australia, beginning this summer, and also against India, that other benchmark of quality, where England play five Tests early next year.

Preliminary indications are that he will rise to the challenge before performing a metaphoric “mic drop”, as the youngsters say, signifying further triumphs and performances of note.

As striking as the runs that Brook is scoring is the speed at which he is scoring them; he is effectively going at a run-a-ball.

Herbert Sutcliffe, who operated in an era when strike-rates were but a twinkle in a statistician’s eye, and who was described by the incomparable wordsmith R.C. Robertson-Glasgow as “the sort of man who would rather miss a train than run for it, and so be seen in disorder and heard breathing heavily”, could only have marvelled at such a rate of progress.

Brook sums up ‘Bazball’ and is already its heartbeat, dashing from platform to platform in a cricketing sense whereas Sutcliffe would apparently have allowed the 8.55 from Leeds to London to leave without him were he fractionally late.

Yet if ‘Bazball’ somehow implies a vulgar brand of cricket in the eyes of purists, a game unrecognisable from Sutcliffe’s time and that of Don Bradman, both would have recognised in Brook a game built on a solid technical foundation which enables him to flit from classic to contemporary in an eye-blink, which in turn explains why he seems equally adept in first-class, one-day and T20 cricket.

Although hardly alone in that, Brook is simultaneously old school and new age, as likely to unfurl a cover drive straight out of the MCC coaching manual (if that venerable volume still exists) as he is to play an outrageous shot straight out of the Timbuktu Premier League.

He might just prove to be the best multi-format player of all because whereas white-ball wonders seem ten-a-penny these days, how many batsmen can do the lot like Brook?

Jonny Bairstow springs to mind as a player of similar facility, while Virat Kohli’s record speaks for itself.

But Brook is the complete player in every sense; you would back him in a T20 run-chase as much as you would back him to score an Ashes hundred.

Mention of Bairstow whets the appetite for the visit of Australia, when Yorkshire will supply, in this opinion, the best three batsmen in the country at present.

Brook, Bairstow and Joe Root, in whatever order you want to put them, are the fulcrum of the batting and the engine room of ‘Bazball’.

It was good to see Root, after a lean spell by his standards, contribute 101 in Wellington to an unbroken stand of 294 with Brook, just days after Root had questioned his own role in the new revolution. The answer to that is simply for him to carry on doing what he has always done, batting at a tempo that is more than good enough and without the need for superfluous funk.

It surely helped Root to have, in Brook, such a quick scorer at the other end at the Basin Reserve, but the notion that Root is some sort of slowcoach ignores the evidence of a glittering CV.

Quite what Brook’s CV will look like when he hangs up his whites is difficult to predict. At present he averages more than Bradman - 100.88 compared with 99.94.

Perhaps his biggest challenge now will be to cut out all the noise, the din of expectation.

The dips will come, that much is certain, but this lad is special.