Over and over and over again: Jimmy Anderson keeps on running

By Samanth Subramanian

Jimmy Anderson, just turned 38, is running farther than ever. For years, he has adhered to the following formula: begin about 20 yards behind the bowling crease; take two or three skittering steps, torso leaning forward at a 45-degree angle as if battling a stiff gale; sprint the rest, then dispatch the ball at between 80 and 90mph at the stumps 22 yards away.

Some light arithmetic reveals that, as of January, Anderson had performed this routine 32,779 times in Test cricket, running a total of nearly 400 miles (600km) for England while bowling. Along the way he had become the flinty edge of England’s bowling attack, collecting 584 wickets, more than any other fast bowler in the game, ever. But last summer he injured his right calf while playing against Australia and realised that he was setting off too abruptly, that he needed more time to accelerate into his sprint. This summer, when the West Indies toured England, he added another ten yards to his run-up, so that he started on the edge of the hot-pink Sandals Resorts logo sprayed into the grass. The way to revive his legs, he found, was to run more, not less.

A fast bowler is Test cricket’s most electrifying sight: the thundering legs, the escalating power, the final detonation at the crease. The sheer kinetic joy of it rouses spectators and quickens their pulse. No other type of cricketer is as viscerally connected to the crowd in an arena. But the Test matches against the West Indies – the first in Southampton, the next two in Manchester – were played to vacant stadiums because of the coronavirus pandemic. Denied an audience, the fast bowler’s energy was like a wave crashing soundlessly on a beach. When Anderson claimed his first victim – leg-before-wicket, the ball speared into a left-handed batsman – there were no bellows of admiration. That felt strange, he thought.

A fast bowler is Test cricket’s most electrifying sight: the thundering legs, the escalating power, the final detonation at the crease

The cricket was still intense, but he missed the nerves and tension that swelled as people filtered in each morning, and the hum and buzz of the crowd. Sky Sports laid a synthetic soundtrack of a crowd over the images, distant mutters of the kind you hear in a crowded café. It was worse than canned laughter on a sitcom, because the noise never changed, no matter what happened on the field. It was as if the long-fretted-over death of Test cricket – its popularity thinning in most of the world, its five-day passage demanding too much of its viewers’ time – had finally and abruptly come to pass.

Playing in this bio-secure environment severed another singular link, between the fast bowler and his ball. Unlike other sports, Test cricket uniquely incorporates the ravages of time itself into the drama. Over the course of many hours, the ball’s smooth, lacquered surface will grow pitted and flaked, but if one half is kept shinier than the other, a marvel of fluid dynamics takes place. The ball swings in the air, sometimes so late that a batsman is fatally unable to react.

Anderson isn’t in the fastest bracket of bowlers, whose missives can reach their opponents at 100mph, so he must rely on the subtle ploys of the swinging ball to wreak damage. He is a ninja of swing. “He can move the ball into you, and he can move the ball away from you, so you never know which way it’s going,” Michael Hussey, a former Australian batsman, told me. “I don’t think I ever learned how to play him.” To encourage swing, the rules of cricket permit bowlers to shine the ball with their saliva. What could be more intimate than a player working his own effluents into the central object of the game?

In the locked-down Tests, though, cricketers were barred from using their saliva, for fear of contagion. At Southampton, the ball abraded all over, and as he’d expected, Anderson found he couldn’t swing it much at all. He recounted this to me on a Zoom call and, for a sharp second, he stopped being the genial, reserved James that he is off the field and turned into Jimmy, one of the grumpiest characters ever to grace a cricket pitch. He’d bowled with iron control, but he knew that, with a little spit and polish, he could have been far more devastating.

It was his 152nd match in 17 years. No fast bowler has played more Tests. It is a trade that taxes the body so heavily that Anderson is admired as much for his longevity as for his skill. But even before the pandemic, the question niggled: how much more of him will we see? He’d just recovered from his calf injury when, in January, he pulled out midway through a tour of South Africa because he’d torn some cartilage off a rib. When he was rested for the second match of the West Indies series at his home ground in Manchester, he’d missed ten of England’s last 14 Tests.

“HE CAN MOVE THE BALL INTO YOU, AND HE CAN MOVE THE BALL AWAY FROM YOU, SO YOU NEVER KNOW WHICH WAY IT’S GOING”

In any other season this might not have seemed very significant. But this was a weird summer, plumb in the middle of a disease-stricken year, in which a virus had exposed the frailties of the human body. This made it difficult to shake the feeling that even Anderson – who has always been so spry and light on his feet; who is being preserved and rationed by English cricket authorities with the prudence of a marooned sailor supplied with a single tin of bully beef; who is finding that the way to run better is to run longer – even Anderson will not be able to run for ever.

The legendary Frank Tyson, who bowled so quickly for England in the 1950s that he was nicknamed “Typhoon”, once explained to a journalist that fast bowling is “the most unnatural physical action you’ll ever see in your life”. The bowler pelts to the crease, the line at one end of the pitch from which he must deliver his ball, front-on, every step sending shockwaves through the knees. He reaches the crease and, still at full tilt, tries to turn sideways as he leaps into the air; the trunk rotates, the spine twists, the shoulders wrench away from the hips. For a split second the bowler is high above the ground, “hang time”, as Ian Pont, a coach, called it in “The Fast Bowler’s Bible”.

It’s a sight of terrible beauty. One of the best cricket photos of all time shows Imran Khan, a Pakistani fast bowler (now the country’s prime minister), floating over the turf, his shadow far below; his body is a weapon, primed and loaded. But the return to earth is a biomechanical nightmare. The back leg crash-lands first, knee and foot cocked at a strange angle; then the front foot takes a long and jarring stride ahead. The spine compresses, then grows hyper-extended. The bowling arm must come over so fast that its shoulder feels like it will burst out of its socket.

For a second, he stopped being the genial, reserved James and turned into Jimmy, one of the grumpiest characters ever to grace a cricket pitch

Few joints are spared. Fast bowlers deal with stress injuries to their knees and ankles, their back, pelvis and shoulders. After a day of bowling, Anderson’s back is as stiff as a plank of wood, and his left ankle aches. “There’s seven times your body weight going through your feet at the point of delivery,” he said. I asked if he’d ever read about how Harold Larwood, an English fast bowler in the 1930s, would sit down in the evening, unlace his shoes and find his socks soaked in blood. “They actually had nails in the soles, back then,” Anderson said. “The boots now have screw-on spikes and they’re much better.” Still, the feet take a beating. In a Test in 2008 at Lord’s, the home of cricket in London, England bowled for three consecutive days against South Africa. “You can feel the blisters coming,” Anderson said. “And you won’t have much skin left on your toes. You don’t even want to look at your feet at the end of the day. You don’t want to take your socks off.” That Lord’s Test is among the few he has tried to forget.

Fast bowling is so unnatural that the body risks forgetting its tortuous craft if it goes too long without all the twisting and flexing. “The physios don’t like us having too much time off bowling,” Anderson told me. “The stiffness and aches and pains you get from the action – they’re all exaggerated so much more after a big lay-off.”

So when he found himself plunged into a hiatus this year, he didn’t know what to do. His rib was healing and he’d been training with Lancashire, the county club he represents alongside England, preparing for a ten-day tour of South Africa. After a winter spent in Manchester, everyone was getting excited about catching some sun. Then, one Tuesday late in February, the Lancashire squad turned up at the Old Trafford stadium for practice, only to be met at the gate by an official who told them to go home. Cricket was off, until further notice.

During the lockdown, the coaches and trainers of the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) sent detailed fitness routines to their players. Anderson has a small gym in his house: a stationary bike, weights, just the bare necessities. He went out for runs, passing shuttered pubs and silent schools, trying to keep to the smaller streets that wound through estates of terraced houses. On Instagram he posted a video of himself bench-pressing his two daughters, aged 11 and nine. But he wasn’t bowling.

Almost involuntarily, he’d reprise his action as he walked around his house: an outswinger while making a cup of tea, a slower ball in the living room. “It was just my body telling me to do it,” he remembered. One of his daughters said to him, “you must really be missing it, if you’re bowling through the kitchen.” Finally in April, when he couldn’t take it anymore, he went into his garage and got out a net he sometimes used to rehearse golf strokes. He set it up at one end of his driveway, put down a mat of artificial turf where he wanted the ball to land and began to bowl. It wasn’t ideal but it kept him ticking over as he waited for the lockdown to end.

No one knew when that would be. Around the time Anderson was bowling into a golfing net, the ECB’s officials were watching the rise and fall of covid-19 infection rates around the world, trying to get a sense of cricket’s future. “At first, we thought we were going to lose the summer – the whole summer, just no cricket at all,” Steve Elworthy, the ECB’s director of special projects, recalled. “We didn’t know when the peak would be, or when the exit from the disease would be, or how stringent the government’s protocols would be.”

Anderson is being preserved and rationed by English cricket authorities with the prudence of a marooned sailor supplied with a single tin of bully beef

The season had to be salvaged by any means possible: television rights had already been sold to Sky, as part of a five-year deal worth £1.1bn. That income, which was used to fund professional cricket across the country, would be in jeopardy if there was no cricket to air. “We worked it like a jigsaw,” Elworthy said. The England team was scheduled to leave for India in mid-September, so officials worked backwards from there: a set of one-day games against Australia just before departure; a series of Tests against Pakistan in August; another trio of one-day matches against Ireland before that; and then the West Indies in July. “We were striking months off our calendar. Oops, we’ve lost April. Now we’ve lost May. If we lost July, we’d lose the West Indies. If we lost August, we’d lose Pakistan. And so on.”

Elworthy was put in charge of working out how games might be staged. In the late 1990s he had been a medium-fast bowler for South Africa, although he never got the ball to swerve in the air as extravagantly as Anderson does. Since 2010 he has worked with the ECB and taken part in plenty of contingency planning to play one-day cricket behind closed doors. In 2015, when the World Cup was being staged in Australia and New Zealand, the ECB did routine due diligence on venues. “So we’d think things like: if you had a game in Christchurch and there was an earthquake so the stands weren’t fit to hold anyone, could you play without an audience?” Last year, when England hosted the World Cup, the ECB mapped out many other scenarios. What if there was a terrorist threat? Or a bomb scare? What if protesters laid siege to a stadium? “Yeah, you tend to think of the most weird and wonderful things, don’t you?” Elworthy said with a sigh.

Still, no one had imagined working out how to play Test cricket in the middle of a pandemic. With football fixtures or one-day cricket, Elworthy said, you could test people for covid-19, clear players and support staff for the games and get them back out of the stadium, all in a single day. A Test match was a different beast. “In Test cricket, people have to stay over. There are players and coaches, but also broadcasters, cameramen, groundsmen and caterers.” A team might spend over a week at the same stadium: two or three days to prepare, and then five days to play the game. The only way forward, Elworthy realised, was to build a bio-secure bubble for the duration of the Test series: a small, self-sustaining universe, impermeable to anyone wishing to pass in or out.

First the bubble had to be blown. Conveniently, the cricket grounds in Southampton and Manchester have Hilton hotels attached to them which had been empty for weeks. The ECB rented all the rooms, deep-cleaned them with chemicals and disinfected them with ozone belched out of handheld machines. They set occupancy limits: no more than 18 people at a time in a dressing room, no more than one person at a table during meals. The individuals most critical to the cricket – players, officials, broadcasting and catering staff – would remain in the inner “green” zone and follow green-tape chevrons on the floor.

Around them, in the “amber” zone, would circulate officials and staff who could obtain a day pass after getting tested. They would never even meet the green-zoners. “On your accreditation, there’s a tracing chip, so that once you enter, we can track your movements on site,” Elworthy said. “We know whom you spoke to, how long you were in a particular place or whether you left your zone.” There were thermal cameras all over the place, to read the temperatures of passers-by, and hand-sanitiser stations were positioned every ten metres – so many of them, Elworthy said, “that you almost feel guilty not putting your hands under them”.

Resurrecting the season depended, oddly, on the misfortunes of other nations. By early June there had been more than 80,000 covid-19 cases in Pakistan and the number was climbing. “They were seeing their peak coming,” Elworthy said. “That made it an easy conversation, because the cricketers wanted to get here.” The ECB chartered a plane to fly Pakistan’s squad to England. By contrast, the Caribbean was virtually free of coronavirus. Elworthy spent hours on Zoom calls persuading the West Indies Cricket Board to send its team over. The ECB promised to sterilise the kits of the West Indies team. It would make four buses available to the squad and its support staff, instead of the usual one. The bubble would hold, the ECB promised, and so the West Indies agreed.

In June, England’s cricketers went back into training, first alone and then in small groups. At Old Trafford, Anderson was given a set of six new cricket balls. These are yours, he was told. You can’t share them with anyone. Later that month, a medic swabbed Anderson’s nose and throat. A week afterwards, when his covid test came out negative, he drove to Southampton to join the rest of the team where everyone was tested once more. And then again and again – swabs once a week. The expression “test cricket” took on a whole new meaning. Each morning too, the players took their own temperatures and typed the readings into an app on their phones. If the thermometer ever registered 37.5°C or higher, it meant trouble.

When the Tests began, Anderson told me, he’d have to prepare his own drinks and keep them by the side of the ground, as if he’d been thrown back into some idyll of village cricket where players mucked in. “I can’t hand my cap and sweater to my umpire, when I bowl. And if we’re celebrating on the field, we’ve been told to avoid high-fives and hugs.” The difficulty of curbing this impulse was plain to see when the broadcasts began. Each time a wicket fell the bowler and fielders rushed towards each other, seemingly intent on vaulting into one another’s arms. Then, at the last moment, they pulled up and bumped fists and forearms instead, all their animation tamped down into awkward twitches.

Fast bowling is “the most unnatural physical action you’ll ever see in your life” and Jimmy Anderson is one of its greatest exponents

Anderson and I spoke for the first time on June 24th, the day after the team arrived in Southampton for the first Test. Over the next four weeks, we settled into a routine. Every few days I’d text him a Zoom link and we’d meet online and talk for an hour. He was always in his hotel room – a neutral-looking, Hilton-y space, with some generic art on the wall behind him. As these sessions progressed, it struck me that if he hadn’t been confined to his room so much during this series, he might not have indulged all my demands for his time.

His father described Anderson to me as “a reserved character. It’s just his upbringing, I suppose. We’re not particularly outgoing – not particularly expressive sort of people.” Glen Chapple, a former bowler for Lancashire where the pair were teammates, told me that his first impression of Anderson was that he was “quiet, very, very quiet. He didn’t say much at all.” Only with the exposure of international cricket has Anderson grown “to be more comfortable in social areas”. When we talked, he was polite and thoughtful, but he always chose his words with transparent caution. Others might have loosened up in the eighth or ninth hour of conversation, fired off a joke, asked some questions, argued, gossiped. Anderson remained as taut as a bowstring.

He told me about his circumscribed life in the hotel: about how the England team ate together, each cricketer at his own table, a couple of metres away from the next; about how only six players at a time could work out in the gym; about the rec room with a pool table, a dart board and a Formula 1 simulator. The bar was shut. The English cricketers weren’t allowed to mingle with the touring West Indians. In the lifts people stood in the corners and faced the walls, to avoid breathing on each other. There was even a protocol for taking a run around the ground. “Dinner finishes at 8pm, and most of the guys have just been going back to their rooms,” Anderson said. “Luckily there’s football on, and Netflix as a fall-back. That’s my evenings at the minute.”

He didn’t know what to expect of the cricket itself. The team had lengthy discussions with ECB officials about the psychology of playing to empty stands. Was a PA announcer still needed to broadcast a bowling change or a rain delay? Should they pipe music into the stadium, between overs or during breaks, to lift the atmosphere? Yes to the PA announcer, it was decided. The music was nixed. This was still, after all, a Test match, the most conservative of cricket’s formats. As someone who’d played a lot of county cricket, Anderson said, he knew what it was like to bowl in front of a small crowd, the proverbial man and his dog. “The thing I’ll miss most, I know,” he told me, “is bowling the very first ball of a Test. That roar as you run into the crease.”

When Anderson was growing up, his father, Michael, owned a video tape of the 1981 Ashes, which England had taken 3-1. They’d lost the first game, drawn the second and then pulled off the most outstanding comeback in cricketing history in the third Test at Headingley in Leeds, before going on to win the next two. It was a series that passed into mythology the instant it ended – a Dunkirk-like display of defiance and heroism. Michael had bought the tape to remind himself, from time to time, how good the series was, and his son watched and re-watched its splendours: Ian Botham’s riotous centuries and his bagsful of wickets, Bob Willis’s pin-precise bowling, the humbling of Australia. “Those were my earliest cricketing memories,” Anderson told me. “Not a bad introduction to the game, to be honest.”

The Andersons lived in Burnley, a town around 25 miles north of Manchester, where Michael still has an optician’s practice. When people from Burnley talk about cricket, the first thing they tend to say, with a hint of apology, is that Burnley is a football town. Burnley Cricket Club (Burnley CC), which abuts the grounds of Burnley FC, is the older of the two teams, founded in 1833, when the town bustled with cotton mills and coal mines.

The club had its taste of international stardom even before Anderson. The West Indian fast bowler Charlie Griffith played for Burnley CC in the 1964 season. He took 144 wickets that year, a record at the time in the Lancashire League, and the club won the championship. Griffith was scary-quick and unnervingly tall – so tall, in fact, that a bedroom had to be specially constructed for him in a house down the road from the ground. Sometimes opposition batsmen had to be ejected from the dressing room, and their bats thrown out after them, to go and face him. Their reticence was “understandable”, said Neil Mortimer, a Burnley CC veteran. “Because, remember, this guy playing Griffith still had to go in to work the next morning.”

For a time, Mortimer played alongside Michael Anderson, who captained the Burnley second team and opened its bowling. The club was a focus of community life. “My mum would take me down to watch my dad, and in the tea break, I’d go play a bit on the outfield,” Jimmy Anderson told me. “And I remember, when I was 11 or 12, being asked to keep score, and trying to keep a neat scorebook.” The school he attended offered no cricket; everyone played football, everyone wanted to be a footballer. Anderson did too, but he loved cricket more. “There was just more to it,” he said. “You could fail with the bat, but still win the game with the ball, or take an amazing catch in the field.”

He struggled to make friends at school. Kids mocked his big teeth, calling him “Goofy” and “Rabbit”. When he tried to snipe back once, he was head-butted for his troubles. The cricket club was a refuge. His life revolved around it: nets twice a week in the summer, games of snooker when it rained, beers when he was old enough.

He’d reprise his action as he walked around: an outswinger while making a cup of tea, or a slower ball in the living room

As a boy, he’d watch just about any sport on TV. “I remember that the first sport he was ever interested in was snooker, and it was the only time he’d sit still – when snooker was on TV,” Michael Anderson told me. “If the Olympics were on, Jimmy would try and emulate the different sports. He’d set up hurdles in the lounge, and run and jump over them.” He didn’t think he was very good at cricket at first. On his driveway at home, he’d copy the actions of English quick-bowlers of the 1990s like Dominic Cork and Phil DeFreitas. He was “bang average”, he decided, until over one holiday season, when he was 15, he grew taller by a whole foot and acquired a measure of serious pace, knocking over the stumps of the batsmen who faced him. Once, in an indoor net session, he broke someone’s bat. “That’s when there were murmurs like, ‘You’ve gotten a bit quicker, haven’t you?’” Anderson told me.

A friend’s mother recommended him to the county’s talent scouts, and he worked his way up, making his Lancashire debut at the age of 20. A year later, at Lord’s, he was playing Test cricket for England – a hot-stepping kid whose auntie, a hairdresser, had bleached his tips before the game. His action was such that, when the ball left his hand, he was looking down into the ground. What need for eyes if the body knew what it was supposed to do?

Neil Mortimer remembers a Saturday in 2003 when Burnley FC had just won a game at home, and the spectators poured into the cricket club for drinks afterwards – just as Anderson came on the TV, bowling his way to a man-of-the-match award in a World Cup game against Pakistan. “His dad and his uncle were right there, with all of us, as Jimmy was knocking over the Pakistani batsmen.” Mortimer said. “It was just a wonderful, surreal moment to be standing there in his club, watching while he played for the country.”

Here’s why the swinging ball foxes the batsman. We all have an innate grasp of Newtonian physics and expect that a sphere propelled across a short distance will move in a straight line. The batsman’s gut does not anticipate a sharp, mid-air deviation. He will be aware that swing is a factor. He might have swotted up on how the ball swings because of the infinitesimal pockets of turbulence that build as the air flows over its thick, stitched seam or over the surface of its roughened half. He might even prepare himself to watch the ball in the bowler’s hand closely, trying to compute how its seam is angled and where its chapped side lies. But this is too much thinking to do when the ball is coming at you at 85mph. So instinct takes over, even though instinct makes mistakes. The swinging ball preys on instinct.

Anderson couldn’t always swing the ball. For a time, when he first played for Lancashire, he’d just run in and bowl as fast as he could. “Occasionally he’d bowl an unplayable delivery, but his accuracy was not 100%,” Mike Watkinson, who coached the county’s second-string team, said. Then one morning, Watkinson and Anderson fell into discussion. Anderson had been reaching for consistent swing – angling the ball’s seam, directing it with his fingers – but at the point of release, his body fell away from the vertical and he lost control. Try to feel the ball at the tips of your first and second fingers for as long as possible, as you’re letting it go, Watkinson told him, and it’ll keep you more upright.

That afternoon, when Anderson opened the bowling, he put the advice into practice, and straight away, the ball obeyed him. He’d need months more to perfect it, but that morning is etched onto Watkinson’s memory. “You have hundreds of conversations with players in your life and most just blow away in the breeze. When something lands, it’s a magical moment.”

One of his daughters said to him, “You must really be missing it, if you’re bowling through the kitchen”

Watkinson isn’t surprised that the tutorial stuck. There’s something of the autodidact to Anderson. “Jimmy is his own coach. He’ll take on pieces of information, but he’ll put them together himself.” He likes working to a plan and he does the research, Watkinson told me. Even today, if he’s bowling for Lancashire – and that doesn’t happen often, given the schedule of international cricket – he’ll watch videos of the batsmen that he’ll bowl to. “Say the opposition has someone on debut. No one will have seen him,” Watkinson said. “He’ll find one of our young cricketers who has played this guy in junior cricket. He’ll ask: ‘How does he play? What does he do?’”

Once he even had to learn how to bowl again, almost from scratch. Soon after he started playing for England, the team’s coaches steered him away from his natural action, worried that he’d wreck his body. When he’s bowling the way he wants, Anderson tends to take the last leap of his run-up with his right arm up by his ear and his spine arched backwards. Around 2004, his action was remoulded, so that his eyes stayed on the batsman throughout, his back remained rigid and straight and his arm hung by his stomach. He’d bowl faster and safer this way, he was told. “But I couldn’t swing the ball, and I was actually slower, which was sort of defeating the objective,” he said. During a tour of India in 2006, his back began to ache. “The physios were quite old-school back then, and they thought I should do more sit-ups.” After he came home, he was so sore that he went to get a scan. It revealed a stress fracture.

That injury must have seemed like a death knell for his career. He had already been drifting in and out of the England team. When his back was crocked, it struck him that he might never break through – that he’d finish his playing days as a Lancashire bowler who’d once, years ago, represented his country. If he harboured any kind of despair, Watkinson said, “he kept a lot of those feelings to himself.” Instead, after he went through rehab, he worked with Watkinson and two other coaches to regain some of his old, natural rhythm. At first, he couldn’t do more than stand at the crease and roll his arm over. Then a two-step run-up, then four steps, then eight, as his mentors performed reconstructive surgery on his bowling action. “That injury”, Watkinson said, “probably came at a good time for him.”

A couple of years later, Anderson was a force. He was like a different bowler, Hussey, the Australian batsman, found. “It was as if he had the ball on a string.” Before he came to England for the Ashes in 2009, Hussey sat down to study the latest videos of Anderson’s bowling. “He was bowling these huge outswingers and inswingers, and it was giving me headaches. I was thinking, ‘How am I going to score any runs?’ I got into such a negative frame of mind that I had to stop watching the footage.”

The expression “test cricket” took on a whole new meaning

Anderson’s bowling is bred for England, where, for reasons that aren’t fully understood, the moist, cool weather grants bowlers greater swing. In hot, dry conditions elsewhere in the world, he suffers. “He hasn’t been as successful in Australia or Sri Lanka, I’d say,” Kumara Sangakkara, a former captain of Sri Lanka, told me. On English grounds, Anderson takes a wicket every 50 deliveries; in Sri Lanka, where he has just 12 wickets from six Tests, that statistic rises to 88 deliveries. His critics will forever point to these struggles to explain why Anderson can’t be classified among the best of history’s best. But even abroad, Sangakkara told me, Anderson never stops discomfiting the batsman. “He has this annoying ability to keep things tight, to dry up the runs. You’re never quite on top of him.”

Fast bowling requires a serene patience. Don’t try to bowl a magic ball, Anderson knows, because then you’ll be trying different things with every ball. He told me about a Test at Lord’s in 2007 when he pitted his restraint against the left-handed Indian batsman Sourav Ganguly. Ball after ball, Anderson ran up and bowled the same kind of delivery: pushed across Ganguly, away from his body. One over went by, and then another, and then a third. Finally, having set Ganguly up, Anderson let rip a ball that did the opposite. It pitched and then moved into Ganguly, as if with a conniving mind of its own, sneaking between bat and body to hit the stumps.

Anderson doesn’t often recollect his wickets so clearly. During one of our conversations, I told him about a clip I’d seen, in which the basketballer Steph Curry described crucial phases of long-bygone games, as if he held a second-by-second archive in his mind of every single fixture he’d played. Anderson marvelled at it: “I forget quite a lot, which is frustrating, because there have been some amazing moments.” Everything about Anderson seems to operate, instead, in the present – not just the clinical diagnosis of a batsman’s flaws, but also the delirium of competition. Anderson calls it the “red mist”, the fog of battle that turns him from bashful James into grouchy Jimmy. “It really does feel like two different people,” he said.

He’s always been this way, his father told me. “He hates losing even at board games during Christmas. If he doesn’t win, he’ll go off and sit by himself for a while, and go all quiet,” Michael Anderson said. Then he added mischievously: “Any sort of game can be fun with James.” Glen Chapple, a Lancashire bowler, went golfing once as part of a trio with Anderson. On the tenth hole, just as Anderson swung his club back, he got distracted. Out of the corner of his eye, he’d seen the other member of the group practising his own stroke. The ball sped out of bounds to the right. “Jimmy didn’t speak to either of us until we got back to the clubhouse,” Chapple said. “And that’s just a friendly game of golf!”

On the cricket field, Anderson’s competitive streak sometimes turned ugly. He admits as much. “I don’t have the out-and-out pace to scare people, so I tried to use my aggression as an extra sort of weapon, I guess.” He’d get angry at batsmen and even chew out his own teammates when they made mistakes. In 2014 the Indian team complained that Anderson had abused and shoved one of its batsmen during a Test. After an inquiry Anderson was absolved, but he didn’t ever want to be hauled up again. With the team’s psychologist, he devised an exercise for himself. “I’ll bowl the ball, right? And then after my follow through, I turn around, and start walking back to the top of my run-up. And in those 25 or 30 metres, I consciously just try to think: ‘Right, did the ball go where I wanted it to go? Did he play a good shot? A false shot? What do I want the next ball to do?’ I try to think of nothing else.” If he does that, the emotion drains out of him. Then he gets the ball back and he’s ready to bowl.

After the Southampton Test against the West Indies, the teams travelled to Manchester for two games. Anderson was rested for the first of them – something that surely gnawed at him, even if he never said as much. He does not do inactivity. He wants to be playing all the time. Especially now, in his 39th year, the kind of age that prompted the Sky Sports commentary team to coo over him in elegiac terms every time he came on to bowl. Look at that record, they’d say. Thirty-eight years young. How do you think he stays fit? What a remarkable career.

It’s inevitable, Anderson knows, to be asked about retirement. “But it’s frustrating, because it’s like the seed is planted in my head and watered every time the question is raised,” he told me. “I’ve averaged about 20 in the last two or three years, the best I’ve ever averaged,” he said. (He meant the runs he conceded for each wicket he took, and he wasn’t far off; in his last 20 games, his average is 23.6) He felt good. His body felt good. “Why would I want to stop?”

He brought up the example of Glen Chapple, who played until he was 41. “And there was that British long-distance runner, who won medals even after she’d had two kids, after she was 40,” Anderson said. He couldn’t remember her name, but he was so intent on making this point that he broke off and looked her up on his phone. It was Jo Pavey, who’s aiming to take part in the Tokyo Olympics next year, aged 47. “I found her very inspiring. So who knows what age I can carry on until?”

“The thing I’ll miss most is bowling the very first ball of a Test. That roar as you run into the crease”

Theoretically this is true. Once upon a time, fast bowlers bashed their knees up and did their back in while still in their early 30s. Shoaib Akhtar, the quickest quick ever, appeared in his last Test when he was 32; Jeff Thomson, an Australian bowler who terrorised batsmen in the 1970s, retired when he was 35; Malcolm Marshall, part of the unrelenting West Indian attack of the 1980s, at 33. Even Michael Holding, another West Indian of fearsome pace, whose body was as finely tuned as a Stradivarius, played just 60 Tests in 11 years. In the same span of time, Anderson turned out in 93 games.

Fast bowlers are better treated these days. They know which muscles to build, what not to eat and how much rest to take. Even so, for Anderson to be a shoo-in for the side at 38 is still astonishing, a feat brought about as much by his own rare athleticism and his desire to play as by any regimen devised by sports scientists. He has already beaten the odds. Why shouldn’t he beat them some more and play into his 40s?

The lesson that the pandemic has taught us is to be a little more like Anderson: to operate in the present. The future will, at some point, be Anderson-less. Better to nurture our quiet relish for his bowling while we can. In the third Test, Anderson took just two wickets, but the first of those was a vision. At 83mph, the ball hit the ground, then rose up and cut away, kissing the outer edge of young, hesitant Shai Hope’s bat on its way to the wicket-keeper. It was the quintessential Anderson delivery, the kind he has been honing for two decades. Nothing happened in the stadium, of course: no rapturous cheers, no wave of applause. Anderson permitted himself a broad smile and a finger raised in triumph as he jogged towards his teammates. They bumped fists and stood around in satisfaction – an interlude of rest before Anderson started running in again.■

PORTRAIT: STU FORSTER

ADDITIONAL IMAGES: GETTY