"You wonder what will happen after a couple of months off," Cook said. "I got bogged down a bit but I was pleased with the patience I showed to get through.
"It’s an opportunity for Trotty and I to get big ones. There are still 200 overs left in this game, which is a hell of a lot of cricket to be played."
Trott did not begin his England career until he was older than Cook is now (26), so he has little hope of that slice of immortality: this century was his sixth. But Trott further cemented his second place in the all-time Test batting averages behind Sir Donald Bradman, lifting his 61 to 66 by the close.
At the outset, however, their partnership was hum-drum because the pitch demanded patience: it was fancy-dress day but not one for fancy batting. While Chennai powered along at ten runs per over in the final of the Indian Premier League, Cook and Trott brought up England’s 50 at exactly two an over.
But too many England teams of the past would have gone out, played big shots, and landed themselves in trouble. Neither Cook nor Trott was too proud or complacent, even after their heroics in Australia, to go back to the basics of blocking or leaving the accurate balls and dispatching the inaccurate ones.
Ajantha Mendis imposed most of the early restrictions, until the batsmen worked him out. His one wicket - Sri Lanka’s only wicket in the 70 overs that followed morning rain - was that of James Anderson who, although he has been declared unfit to bowl for the rest of this game, was able to visit the crease: ‘bat’ might be too strong a term, but he had done his duty as nightwatchman yet again by surviving overnight, the 16th time out of 16.
Anderson was caught by the finest slip-fielder Asia has produced. Well might Graeme Swann envy Mendis for having Mahela Jayawardene at slip, for among the nuts and bolts that England need to tighten before the Lord’s Test is their slip-fielding to spin.
Anderson is still unproven as England’s slip for Swann, and Andrew Strauss even more so: he got a wrist, not a hand, on the edge that Prasanna Jayawardena sent his way off Swann’s quicker ball.
Strauss had tasted the job in the Mohali Test of five years ago, dropped one off Monty Panesar and abandoned it. Such a specialist position is slip to a spinner - and such is England’s dearth - that Jayawardene should be invited to give a master-class at the Loughborough academy after this tour.
England’s acceleration was impressively smooth. Cook was first to put his foot down, after Mendis’s first six overs had cost three runs. As in Australia, he never contemplated the outside lane, or even fourth gear, just content to move from second to third and tootle along the whole day.
Human weakness surfaced momentarily. Two successive balls however from the slow left-armer Rangana Herath served to illustrate Cook’s great strength as well. First he missed an ambitious sweep, then he missed out on a full toss, driving straight to a fielder.
But thereafter it was like winter returning to the Northwest Passage. There was no way through Cook’s defence; and the dispatching of inaccurate balls was resumed.
Trott was no less patient and no less unflustered. Ordinary mortals would have become upset at such a slow start: after 30 balls the Master of Melbourne, and Baronet of Brisbane, had reached five. In one over from Mendis he had missed out on three short balls to the extent of scoring only a single.
It is Graham Gooch, England’s batting coach, who preaches from the ancient text saying only the next ball matters, and he could not have asked for two more ardent devotees than England’s second-wicket pair.
Trott cover-drove his 31st ball for four, and was away, beaver-busy, as insatiable for runs as Cook - no mean appetite - and almost caught his partner up.
Sri Lanka rang the changes but had no extreme pace to call on, and no extreme spin in the absence of Muttiah Muralitharan, and no extreme foxiness in the absence of Chaminda Vaas. After tea Herath resorted to bowling over the wicket outside the righthander’s legs: unspoken condemnation of the pitch’s lifelessness.
As everything is measured nowadays, perhaps pitches should also be. If more than two edges fail to carry off pace bowling to the wicketkeeper - as here - let a ground be banned from staging international cricket for a year: that would activate administrators intent on five-day blandness.
Test cricket is bringing its own extinction closer by being staged on such pitches. Or stage it at night, without floodlights.
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