4 days ago
Jimmy Anderson: ‘I know my body has got a certain amount of deliveries left in it'
Sir Jimmy Anderson is running late, five, then 10 minutes past 10 before he arrives in front of his computer. He is dishevelled, like he is just up and into his T-shirt and jeans. He finished his first match since July the previous evening, Lancashire against Derbyshire in the County Championship, on a flat pitch at Old Trafford, and is still feeling it.
The fourth day had been hard going: 16 overs, eight maidens, two for 25, in a thwarted attempt to force victory against a Derbyshire team hell-bent on securing a draw. Lancashire finished two wickets short. 'I've woken up feeling like absolute death,' Anderson says. 'It was a bit of a wake-up call.'
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He arranges his stiff limbs into his office chair. 'You can do all the training you want, but being out in the field for a full day is just so different. Particularly on that wicket. You feel like you have to put 100% effort in every ball to get anything from it. So it was interesting getting out of bed this morning.'
I mention a line from one of Ian Botham's books, that appeared in this paper that same day. 'I knew it was all over the morning it took me five minutes to get out of bed,' Botham wrote. Anderson laughs. 'I'm not there yet,' he says, 'but I know what he means.'
Anderson will be 43 in July. He has played more Tests than any other Englishman, taken more Test wickets than any other fast bowler, has his own end at Old Trafford – and now a knighthood, too, after Rishi Sunak named him in his resignation honours list. Anderson is a man who manages to make his own first name seem too formal to use, so it is no surprise he seems as comfortable with his new title as a teenage boy with the wedding suit his mother has picked out for him. He almost winces when it's mentioned.
'Until I've actually been to receive it, I'm not even sure I believe it is happening,' he says. He makes sense of it by seeing it as a shared honour, one belonging to the people around him too, his family, and his friends, coaches, and teammates at Lancashire, where he has played since he was a teenager. 'For something like this to happen to a player that's come through the ranks, I think everyone's just really, really happy about it.' Some of his teammates, the ones born after he made his debut, talk about how amazed they are to find themselves playing alongside him.
And some of his old teammates, the ones who served with him through a couple of decades of Test cricket, are just as amazed he is still at it. They have long since moved on, into coaching or commentating. Anderson has done a bit of both. He worked as a coaching consultant for England last year, has his BBC podcast, Tailenders, his book, Finding the Edge, which is just out in paperback, and he is about to go on tour around England in September. He is not back bowling for Lancashire because he needs to be, but because he wants to be. You could ask him why. And you could also ask a bird why it flies. I do wonder if, deep down, he is a little scared by the idea of letting go of a job that's been such a large part of his life for the past 25 years.
Anderson says not. 'Because I know for a fact that my body has got a certain amount of deliveries left in it. Once that goes, I'll no longer be a bowler. But as long as my body allows me to bowl, I will see myself as a bowler. And other people can see me as whatever they want to see me as. I don't care.'
He enjoys playing senior pro around Lancashire's young team. 'I know the standards that you've got to set yourself if you want to make it as a county cricketer, hopefully they can see how I go about things and that helps.' It's not dissimilar to what he was doing with England, when he was counselling the bowlers they had picked to take over from him. 'I enjoyed that, the tactical side of things is something I've done all through for the latter part of my career, trying to come up with plans for how we're going to win a Test match. That wasn't that new to me.'
The other stuff, 'the actual technical side of it', he still needs to learn. He has picked up bits of it along the way, but he wants to do his coaching qualifications some day soon. 'There'll be plenty of time to do that in the future, right now I'm focused on playing this year with Lancashire.'
There was a thought he could turn out for other teams. He put in for the Indian Premier League auction – 'as a bit of a punt really, it wasn't about the money, it was about trying to experience the IPL, especially with my dip into coaching, I wanted to see how things work over there, because I've never been' – but he was not picked up.
It was the same in the Hundred and curse the fool who thought their team would do better without him. He is one of the biggest draws in English cricket and more than capable of bowling 20 good balls. He is contracted to play the Blast for Lancashire, 'but I think we've got a really strong T20 bowling attack, so I'm not expecting to play a huge amount'. He watches the way the white ball swings in those first few overs, and thinks: 'I'd love to be able to have a chance of doing that.' He says: 'But there are so many good bowlers around, so many much younger bowlers as well, who deserve their chance, you never know. If I have a good year …'
Three days after we spoke, Lancashire rested him from their game against Leicestershire at Grace Road. They said they were 'managing his workload'.
The way Anderson talks about working with younger players begs the question: does he wish he had been given a crack at the captaincy? Especially since Pat Cummins has proved fast bowlers can do it. He chews over the idea. 'I don't think so. Just having been quite close to a couple of the England captains recently, like Joe Root and Ben Stokes, I saw everything that comes with it, and I don't know how I'd have coped with all that.
'I would have loved the nice bits, tossing the coin at half-ten in the morning and deciding what to do, setting the fields, all that, but everything else, you need to be a certain type of character for it.'
He doesn't really do 'what ifs'. Never has. He says it helps that a lot of the big decisions he has faced in his career were made for him. 'I haven't had to think twice about them. I was moved on from the white-ball team and I was moved on from the Test team. There's nothing whatever I could do about that. You put it down to whatever you want to put it down to, fate, I guess.'
He mentions his daughter, who is doing her GCSEs. 'She texted me after her chemistry exam yesterday. 'I got really lucky with the questions,' she said. She was really worried about chemistry. And I said back: 'You've worked so hard that you deserve whatever luck you get.'
'That's how I've gone through my whole career. If I work hard enough off the field, I'll get what I deserve on the field. Everything after that is what it is. Whether it's an injury, or someone saying 'you're not playing white‑ball cricket any more', or 'we don't want you in the Test team any more', you deal with it as best you can then find the best way to move on from it by working hard at the next thing.' It is why, he says, he would not change a thing about his career.
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Anderson is not sure if he would rather be starting out in cricket in 2000 or 2025. 'It's such a different game now, in terms of the opportunities that are out there. I really hope there are enough guys coming through wanting to play Test cricket, looking up to Ben Stokes, to Joe Root, thinking, 'yeah, I want to be the next Harry Brook' or whoever it is. Because I do hear a lot of chat about the franchises, there's so many leagues throughout the winter. Even T10 is a thing you can earn decent money playing now.'
He pauses. 'I was never well off growing up, but I never once thought that I wanted to play cricket because it would make me good money, I always just wanted to be 'the next Darren Gough' or whoever it was. That is what I was thinking. I love the game so much. I just hope that we've got enough guys who love it that way too, love watching it, and love playing it, and who want to be stars for England, because unless you've got that, unless you've got people pushing and pushing and pushing to get into that England Test team, then it all drifts away.' The idea hurts him, same as it hurts everyone who loves cricket.
There is nothing like a Test, he says. 'It brings out all different sorts of sides to you that you would never find if you just played T20 for your whole career. I know it's hard, especially for the bowlers, but it is just the most satisfying thing to take five wickets to win a game of cricket for your team, to walk off the field afterwards with your head held high. That's like the best feeling.' And if he could only hold on to it, he would never let it go.
