“I’m not getting too dark here,” Jimmy Anderson says quietly as we return to a time when he was a solitary boy in Burnley, “but I remember sitting in my room thinking: ‘I wish I wasn’t me. I wish I was someone else.’ That’s not a great place to be at 14. I didn’t fit in at school or have a group of mates. The biggest thing for me then was the feeling of being lonely.
“I didn’t have close friends. We didn’t play cricket at school. I was seen as a bit of an odd person who liked cricket. Why would you like cricket when you can play football and these other amazing sports? I did play them, but obviously not to the same level as cricket. I just felt like an outcast.”
