Harry Brook quick out of the blocks with a record start by an England Test player

On Sunday in Karachi, the Yorkshireman further improved that sequence, becoming the first England player to score three or more hundreds in his first four Tests.

“This is Harry Brook’s world and we’re all just living in it,” as the Yorkshire County Cricket Club Twitter feed observed.

It certainly feels that way at the moment , the 23-year-old adding a brilliant 111 to scores of 153 and 87 in Rawalpindi and 9 and 108 in Multan, giving him 468 runs in five innings so far - already the most by an England player in a Test series in Pakistan - at the Bradman-esque average of 93.6.

What a remarkable cricketer this young fellow is; on current form, not just the latest addition to England’s top-order, but its most scintillating diamond.

On a day when Joe Root fell for a golden duck, his fifth single-figure score in his last nine Test innings, and his 10th in his last 20, it had the feel if not of a changing of the guard, for that would be absurd, but certainly one of the dawning realisation that we are watching a fellow who will surely one day replace his county colleague as England’s best batsman.

One remembers writing several times last summer, in fact, as Brook tore into county attacks with the air of a pit bull let loose among the presents beneath a Christmas tree, that he lost nothing in comparison - aesthetically or arithmetically - with his esteemed Yorkshire team-mate.

The style, the touch, the prodigious power combined with seemingly effortless timing, let alone the frightening run-scoring output, made many Yorkshire supporters question why Brook had not been elevated to the Test team before he made his debut against South Africa at the Oval in September.

Remarkably, Brook does not yet average 40 in first-class cricket, but it is only a matter of time before he leaves that number far behind.

Sterner tests lie await, of course, but the improvement has been stark these last 12 months.

So much so, up to and including his appearance for England Lions against Australia A in Brisbane last December, Brook had scored 2,100 runs in 78 first-class innings at 27.63, with 11 fifties and four hundreds.

Since then, he has scored 1,477 runs in 18 first-class innings at 96.46, with seven fifties and six hundreds - not so much a man learning on the job as one who has taken full ownership of that job to the extent that he is now running the whole company.

By scoring three or more hundreds in his first four Tests, Brook is in rare company indeed.

George Headley, the first in the sequence, and a man nicknamed “The Black Bradman”, hit four - including a double - in his first four Tests for West Indies against England in 1930.

Headley, whose supporters in turn dubbed Bradman “The White Headley”, was undoubtedly one of the greatest players the game has seen, and he proved it in those months leading up to his 21st birthday, striking 176 on debut in Bridgetown and then, after a relatively lean time of it in the Trinidad Test, 114 and 112 at Georgetown and 223 in Kingston.

Headley scored 703 runs in total in that four-match rubber and in all first-class cricket averaged just shy of 70.

Next to do it was Arthur Morris, the Australian left-hander, who took England for 155 in the second innings of his third Test appearance in the New Year’s fixture at Melbourne in 1947.

Morris followed up with a hundred in each innings (122 and 124 not out) in the next game in Adelaide.

Conrad Hunte, another famous West Indies batsman, achieved the feat during the 1958 home series against Pakistan, scoring 142 on debut in Bridgetown, then 260 in the third Test in Kingston and 114 in the fourth match in Georgetown.

Next on the list was the great Sunil Gavaskar, the Indian maestro who started his Test career the best of the lot.

Gavaskar emulated Headley’s feat of four hundreds in his first four Tests, including a double, but outstripped him in terms of scoring with 774 runs in that time at 154.8, making 116 in the second Test in Georgetown, then 117 not out in Bridgetown and 124 and 220 in Port-of-Spain.

The last to do it before Brook was another Indian, Mohammad Azharrudin, in the home series against England in 1984-85.

Azharrudin was selected three games into the five-match series and started off with 110 on debut at Eden Gardens, before scoring 105 in Chennai and 122 in Kanpur, but England still won the series 2-1.

And so Brook, at first-class level, is ending 2022 in much the same way he began it for Yorkshire. He opened the Championship campaign in the same fashion, in fact, with three hundreds in his first four games.

Gloucestershire were taken for 101 at Nevil Road, Kent for 194 at Headingley and Essex for 123 at Chelmsford.

It was all part of a remarkable sequence which saw Brook begin the season with nine scores of 50-plus in 10 first-class innings, narrowly missing out on making it 10 out of 10 when he was dismissed for 41 against Lancashire at Headingley.

Who knows what manner of statistics will rest beside his name a decade or so from now.