A lone figure strides along a dark blue running track underneath forlorn Manchester skies. The clouds are thick enough to make the Beautiful South swoon and a cotton vest damp in a glance. The half-prised tuna can of the Etihad Stadium lurks in the background. A couple of weary floodlights strain against the gloom, the only things to break through the greyness of the scene the luminous orange trainers and bright blue knee socks sported by the solitary runner. “First track session of the year,” goes the caption. Richard Hawley croons in the background: “Love you and never be old, then we feel the hope … you leave your body behind you.” It’s a pointed choice of tune.
On the other side of the globe, another figure – shorter, stockier, clad in creamy white – is slowly walking off the sun-soaked turf at the Sydney Cricket Ground. Kissing the badge on his green helmet and holding his arms outstretched like a milkmaid’s shoulder yoke. He soaks up the applause from thousands of spectators, including family and friends, who have risen to him inside the stadium.
As one old cricketer leaves the crease, another prepares to get back to it. After 15 years at the international coalface, beguiling, dividing and entertaining not just the cricketing public in his own country but around the world, David Warner, aged 37, called time on his Test career last week. Warner made his Test debut in December 2011 by which time (the now 41-year-old) Jimmy Anderson was already into his third or fourth iteration of international fast bowler, a coiled-spring colossus who had dominated the Australian summer before Warner’s arrival, pocketing 24 wickets and leading England towards their first Ashes series win in Australia in 24 years … or five-eighths of a (current) “Jimmy”.
For Warner, a few years of lucrative Twenty20 franchise tournaments await, a cash-injected climbdown into full retirement some day in the not too distant future. For Anderson it is a case of more lonesome loops of the running track in an attempt to leave his body behind, or keep it at bay a bit longer, at least. More indoor sessions bowling at a stump as singular as his mindset, tinkering, tightening, Benjamin Button-ing his frame with the addition of multivitamins and boyish haircuts. For Anderson, India lies in wait. Five Tests in only seven weeks.
India is no place for a medium-pace swing bowler, not really, especially not a 41-year-old one. The heat and the bone-grinding nature of the pitches are enough to strike fear into the guts of the most battle-hardened quick, even those who can rely on searing pace to exploit and unsettle. And yet Anderson defies logic, curls a collagen lip at it and carries on regardless. Take his last visit to India, in 2021, when on the verge of turning 40, he took eight wickets at an impressively parsimonious average of 15.87, holding the line like a gnarled sentinel in the three Tests he played. Yet even Anderson at his most miserly couldn’t prevent England’s 3-1 series defeat.
During England’s landmark series win in India in 2012, Anderson was 30 and played all four Tests under the captain, Alastair Cook. His wickets column and average were higher (12 wickets at 30.25) but the seamer used all his accumulated wiles to jag and cut the ball off the Indian clay, ably supporting the spin of Graeme Swann and Monty Panesar, to secure England’s first Test series win in India since 1984-85 (or 28 years; seven-tenths of a Jimmy).
In 13 Tests in India Anderson has an exemplary record, taking 34 wickets at 29.32, only three runs higher than his overall average across 183 Tests. Despite this, he heads to the subcontinent under something of a cloud, not gunmetal in hue as of yet but pointedly urn-shaped.
During the Ashes series last summer Anderson cut an increasingly subdued figure, the seamer going as far as to describe the English pitches as “like kryptonite” while Mark Wood, Chris Woakes and most notably his bandana-clad comrade-in-arms over the past decade, Stuart Broad, did the business and prevented Australia from winning the series outright. Broad swapped the bails and bent the narrative towards a rousing and remarkable send-off at the Oval but Anderson dismissed any talk of his own retirement, saying Broad’s decision to call it a day spurred him on to keep going, despite a chastening summer. A return of five wickets in four Tests and – perhaps more pertinent – a summer-long inability to garner any meaningful movement on the same English pitches that have served him so well for nearly two decades.
Anderson rankles when asked about “the R-word” and is clearly putting the hard yards in, as he always has, for another stint in England’s attack. He’s also on record saying he would like to decide when the time is right to go, and plenty will say he has earned at least that. But sport doesn’t really work that way; its central tenets are spontaneity and unpredictability. You risk being burnt if you start to think it owes you something, even if, like Anderson, you have given it nearly everything you have.
In his desire to continue playing Test cricket Anderson, despite his longevity and unparalleled service, has put himself at the mercy of the selectors with a bruising Test series in India imminent. Broad and Warner have recently had their day in the sun, Cook and plenty more before them, too. Anderson, for the time being, is marching on, leaving his body behind yet moving forward once again, head bowed against the gathering clouds.
