Phil Walker, Wisden Cricket Monthly editor-in-chief, attempts to get to grips with the idea of an England Test team without James Anderson ahead of his Lord’s farewell.
Ubiquity explains the grief. Jimmy Anderson is meant to be there forever, ageless, immutably present-tense; until suddenly he wasn’t.
Round our way, the news stopped us all in our tracks. To hell with reason: the waning match stamina, the slight nip reduction, the sense (well-judged, as it happens) that it was just time. No matter. Glazed young staffers staggered through the day, unable to recall life without him. Wearied oldsters retired to their anecdote libraries, while the rest of us prised open the drafts folder to dust down the obit-tribute we tentatively started a decade ago.
We work on it one last time, rounding out the details, updating the last few stats and landmarks. We drop in a quote or two. Strauss: There must be life after Anderson. Key: It’s scary, but we have to move on. And come the end of the process, feeling a little vertiginous at the base of these skyscrapers, it’s tempting to dwell on one’s own life, on all those calls unmade and balls unplayed, all those jobs half done, those challenges not merely unmet but unrecognised, within the borders of one’s own uselessness. Or maybe that’s just me.
Point is, he did a lot: 432 wickets at 24.13 since turning 30; 220 wickets at 22.86 since turning 35. Joint most wickets for an overseas seamer in Asia (92 at 27.51); and more Tests – Lord’s will be his 188th – than anyone in history not called Sachin. Anderson is a good, honest day’s work (20.3 overs) from bowling 40,000 deliveries in Test cricket. No one else who ever ran up to a crease for a living gets anywhere close.
He couldn’t and wouldn’t stop. There’s something magnificent, perhaps a little unhinged but still magnificent, about the fact that Anderson, aged 41 and three-quarters, went into that Manchester hotel in early May to meet his captain, coach and MD, fully expecting to discuss the summer ahead, and not just his 29th Test at Lord’s, the ground with which he’s synonymous.
His inner circle closed ranks around the specific nature of that meeting (Rob Key put it delicately afterwards: "I don't think Jimmy was expecting it... but I don't think it was completely unexpected"). But should it be the case that he was dragged out of it kicking and screaming, then isn’t that just the perfect ending?
I’d hate to think of him going gently. I want him accepting the pomp and circumstance of a farewell game only through lock-jawed teeth. I want him ready to swap in a heartbeat the pageantry of ‘Jimmy’s Week’ for one more new-ball spell somewhere, anywhere, in the provinces.
The sound of a great prizefighter’s rage drowning out the final bell has been central to the Anderson legend for a long time now. (Put it this way, I once commissioned a piece entitled LIFE AFTER JIMMY… in 2015.) A favourite personal memory has some of that spirit.
January 2018, the last knockings of the Sydney Test at the end of a horribly one-sided Ashes series. I’m there with Felix White, now Anderson’s Tailenders podcast co-host, watching through our fingers. The fourth day had been Sydney’s hottest on record since the 1930s, the captain’s conked out in the dressing room with acute dehydration and his team are about to lose by an innings and plenty. Anderson, again, is batting. I’ve seen this film before, at Perth in 2013, when he was bounced out by Mitchell Johnson and had to be dragged from the middle as the Ashes are surrendered. It’s not Johnson this time but the Cummins-Hazlewood-Starc troika.
Since nothing in sport compares to the barbarism of a No.11 being bombarded on a quick pitch by fast bowlers, you’d think he might want to get out of there, and especially so when he’s given out caught-behind. And yet as the players converge, and the umpires move in to pull up the stumps, Anderson is gesturing wildly that he wants to review the decision, deeply aggrieved to be robbed of the chance to build on his series scores of 5*, 0*, 0, 0*, 0*, 1*, 0, 0* and 2. On being told there are no reviews left, he slumps, swears, and throws his arms up in defiance of such injustice. Cruel game. He’d probably still be batting now.
Thus begin the stories to accompany the final lap. We’ve got him for five more days. The whole thing will be swooningly excessive. They’re a little absurd, these outpourings, yet we’ll lap it up. Play that long, do that much, and you end up belonging to all of us. We don’t do much very well in this country at the moment, but we really step up for a wake. The mood will veer between celebratory and mawkishly poignant. Hopefully, if all goes to plan, he’ll hate it.
There is no stipulated shelf life to the craft of writers, actors, artists, and so on. They simply change shape with the seasons. The gods of sport, on the other hand, are only immortal until the second they’re past it. Anderson railed better than anyone ever against the rub of time. Perhaps, then, seeing as we’re talking legacies, the best we can hope for from a post-Anderson world is that this epoch of Test cricket, the one he so utterly embodied, is not retired with him.
This article is taken from issue 78 of Wisden Cricket Monthly, our Men’s T20 World Cup preview issue which available to pre-order here
