Welcome to The Spin, the Guardian’s weekly (and free) cricket newsletter. Here’s an extract from this week’s edition. To receive the full version every Wednesday, just pop your email in below.
You stand at the top of your mark. Breathe in. Breathe out. Here you go again. You are at your favoured Pavilion End. This is your 26th time playing a Test at Lord’s. A little while ago you didn’t really know if you’d get to play another, here or anywhere else, again. You don’t think about that. You don’t think about the first time, a first over in Test cricket where you felt numb, an over that went for 17 runs largely because there was no fine leg – thanks, Nasser. You don’t think about the first wicket (Mark Vermeulen) or the last (Marcus Harris), or the other 638.
You don’t think about how you, a shy kid from Burnley, a cricket-mad kid who used to study Shaun Pollock and Peter Martin and copy bits of their bowling action, ended up here, at the Home of Cricket, with all eyes on you. Here, where you’ve taken 110 wickets, the scene of your Test-best figures of seven for 42, your 500th Test wicket – Kraigg Brathwaite, emphatically bowled in fading sunlight on a perfect afternoon.
You used to just bowl as fast as you could, a tearaway quick with frosted tips. You were never really sure back then, of yourself or your role. If you were trying to hit helmets or toes or somewhere in-between. You were told: “Don’t worry about where it goes, just bowl fast.”
This need, or desire, for speed broke you in the end. Messing with your action and putting you out of kilter. Years lost. Your talents interfered with by pace-hungry bowling coaches pitting you in a war with yourself rather than in a contest with the batter. Until enough was enough. You’ll do it your way, the way you used to do it. The way you did as a kid.
You don’t think about the years you’ve spent honing your craft. The feel of the ball in your hand. Your cocked wrist, the seam resting in your fingers. The feeling as you release the ball from their tips, sometimes gently like a conjuror revealing a dove, sometimes pronounced, sometimes with a knowing tweak, a flourish, twisting a key in a lock or deadheading a rose.
You don’t think about how much it hurts, of course it hurts. You are 39 years old, it’s not easy and you wouldn’t want it to be. You take pleasure in the pain. That moment in the morning when you wake and you are dog-tired. Your body humming with a dull ache, you almost find it comforting. Satisfying. The physical signs of a job well done. Maybe you’ll get into that effortless, zen-like state, a “blissed out” feeling you can sometimes tap into when you bowl, everything in sync, “like he’s got the ball on a string” they sometimes say. You don’t think about that.
You’ve been through your plans and know exactly what you are going to do. The outswinger. Your stock ball. The ace in your hand, the delivery from which everything else stems, every plan, every deception. Inswinger, reverse-swinger, off-cutter, leg- cutter, wobble seam, slower ball, knuckleball. You tilt the seam by minuscule degrees like a sailor catching a gust of wind, harnessing longitude, latitude and Lancashire nous.
You don’t think about it but you know how lucky you are, to have played for so long, to have remained largely injury-free. You feel for the young bowlers who are falling like dominoes to stress fractures, you’ve been there, in the corset for six weeks unable to do anything. It’s frustrating, maddening. You came back, so – hopefully – will they.
You don’t think about who will share the new ball at the Nursery End. It could be Stuart, it might not be. He’s your No 1 partner, Sundance to your Butch, but you’ve played with a lot of guys over the years. Andrew Flintoff, Steve Harmison and Matthew Hoggard as well as Darren Gough, James Kirtley, Martin Bicknell, Kabir Ali, Darren Pattinson, Ryan Sidebottom. You don’t think about the fact you’ve played Test cricket with Ed Smith and Rob Key, that you’ve dismissed your new coach, Brendon McCullum, three times.
You don’t think about the other 36,396 times you’ve done this. You are just living the next six seconds, 12 paces. One ball.
You can vaguely hear the crowd, the “Oh, Jimmy Jimmy” leading into a mournful trill of Jerusalem. You set off. Short steps into big strides. The wind in your hair, flecked with grey now rather than peroxide. The breeze at the back of your slight but muscular shoulders. A blur of greens, creams and the crowd swirl into a colour palette at the peripheries as your vision begins to focus like the rifling on a gun.
Six-hundred and forty times you’ve done this has it led to a wicket, 35,756 times it hasn’t. You’ve been hit for 17,014 runs and hated every single one.
Your eyes are loosely fixed on the batter, the crease line, top of off stump. Your body is in motion and your mind is completely free. You don’t think about anything. You arrive at the crease, enter your gather, your action. You do think about lifting your final finger from the seam and you let go.
Your head dips, as it always has with the exertion. For a split-second you lose the ball as the turf comes into view, you raise your head back, recalibrate, home in on the flight of the ball that you’ve just delivered.
You’re Jimmy Anderson. You bowl. It’s what you do.
Supporting Mondli Khumalo
When it matters, the cricket community rallies round, and right now they are all with Mondli Khumalo. The former South Africa U19 star remains in a medically induced coma at Bristol’s Southmead hospital, where he has been since suffering a fractured skull in an attack in Bridgwater in the early hours of Sunday morning. He had been out celebrating victory for his club side, North Petherton CC, earlier on Saturday.
Three times since his admission Khumalo, 20, has undergone emergency surgery to remove clots caused by bleeding on his brain. The last of those came on Tuesday afternoon after a period of relative stability. Khumalo’s agent, Rob Humphries, and teammate Lloyd Irish have been by his bedside throughout. On Tuesday they were asked more than once to “have a moment” with Khumalo, with doctors unable to confirm he would pull through. Fortunately, he did and remains stable.
The club have set up a fundraising page to help pay for Khumalo’s recovery, with Trade Nation pledging to donate £50 for every six and £150 for every ball struck out the ground in Somerset’s T20 clash with Glamorgan on Friday night.
