For Andrew Strauss, the past week has provided the most recuperative of homecomings after the trauma of the Arabian winter. First one Test century comes along after a gap of 18 months, and now another to leave him two short of breaking a 73-year-old England record and – more importantly – once more secure as a leader both in name and status.

Strauss's hundred was decorated with the usual mixture of dismissive cuts and pulls, an innings of great authority that leaves him ahead of Alastair Cook and Kevin Pietersen in the race to reach a new England mark of 23.

"It [the record] doesn't really mean that much right now," Strauss said. "These are the kind of things you look back on at the end of your career, when you want to judge where you've been in the scheme of things. It's a different game now, we play a lot more cricket. Anyway, when you look at how many Sachin [Tendulkar] has got, you can see that 20 isn't that many."

Tendulkar's Test tally of 51 is probably safe, but for Strauss this is still an unexpected bloom into mid-season form for a player who had been the subject of some sceptical whispers about his place on batting merit after a difficult winter.

"To a degree it's a confidence thing," he said. "Cricket is a very strange game. Sometimes batting feels hard, sometimes it's easy. It definitely took a lot less out of me than it did at Lord's. I'm in good form now and I just want to make the most of it. It's nice to be in form and to feel I'm contributing as captain. I'm just going to focus on getting myself back in in the morning."

There lies another challenge for a batsman who has never added more than six to an overnight hundred. He is unlikely to find many friendlier attacks than this inexperienced West Indies lineup on a hospitable pitch. Strauss denied that England had deliberately targeted Shane Shillingford, the off-spinner playing his first Test in England – "he just bowled a few balls I could put away" – albeit for Pietersen, Strauss's partner in a stand of 136, it is currently more a matter of targeting anybody who has the temerity to bowl at him.

"He's playing with such freedom it makes it very difficult for opposition captains," Strauss said. "When he plays like that it's when he's at his best and when he's genuinely world class."

The standfirst to this article has been corrected to reflect that it was Strauss's 21st century, not his 23rd