Birmingham, Aug 11: With an unbeaten 182 runs at the end of Day 2, Alastair Cook took England to a 232-run lead over India. The England opener was involved in two century stands - with Andrew Strauss (186 runs) and with Kevin Pietersen (122 runs) - as England scored 456 runs at the loss of just three wickets with consummate ease.

Having scored his 19th Test century in his 71st match, the tall left-hand batsmen spoke about his innings at the end of day’s play.

Excerpts from the media interaction:

On the England innings

A really good day for England, to get over a 200 [run] lead, losing three wickets. Everyone played their part and [I’m] pretty sure we build on that tomorrow.

On what he told himself as he set out to bat in overcast conditions in the morning

We need to get the better of the weather and the first over and a half was tough. When bowlers are fresh, it [is] hard work. [We decided to] to smile again through that and get them into the second and third spell [and] get [to a good score], and we did.

On being amongst the runs again and becoming the highest run-scorer in this calendar year and how much it matters to score runs in a particular series

Yeah, it does [matter to get runs in a particular series], [and it is] very frustrating when you don’t score runs. It’s been interesting conditions with the new ball. First hour and a half, how you manage to get through it [is crucial]. [It’s] important that we get through and then all I did was cashed in on it.

On the conditions always being perfect when England come out to bat

Well, not quite so sure about that. [If] we go back to Lord’s first day, it was pretty overcast then but it is a matter of how you bat and we batted a long period of time so [we can] put it down to lot of hard work

On how he approaches his innings

I take it ball by ball. I just try and focus on the next ball, […] keep going and keep telling yourself keep going one ball at a time because as I said, at the beginning of the series I wasn’t scoring any runs so it was important that we do get in and cash in.