Edgbaston, five weeks back, and Jimmy Anderson is at the end of his run. It’s his first spell of the series and a good morning for it. Play has started five minutes late because it has been raining, there are clouds above and four slips in a line behind. Anderson’s first over is a maiden, Usman Khawaja plays him soft and late, from deep in his crease. Second over, Anderson serves him a straight one which Khawaja plays to mid-off, a second on off-stump, which he blocks, and then slips him the away-swinger. It slides across the face of Khawaja’s bat and passes by an inch wide of his edge.
Anderson throws his arms down wide either side, the beginnings of a celebration which he’ll never get to finish, then collects himself, stares at Khawaja, purses his lips, smiles as he spins on his heels to begin again. It is only a matter of waiting, isn’t it? In the English summer, Anderson’s wickets are as reliable as rain showers, 27 last year, 18 the one before, 16 the one before that, 33, 39, 30, 33, 37 on and on all the way back into the early years of the century.
“Patience is vital for a swing bowler,” Anderson once said. Five weeks later, he’s still waiting. The second day of the fifth Test started with Anderson opening the bowling, again, and Khawaja on strike, again. Anderson’s first over was a maiden, again, and then in his second he bowled Khawaja a straight one, which hit him on the thigh pad, a wider one, which he blocked to cover, and then, yes, slipped him the away-swinger. Khawaja leaned out to play it without moving his feet, then watched it break past him and slide right by the outside edge of his bat. This time, Anderson scowled, and mopped his brow. He wasn’t smiling now.
Anderson has been looking for that missing last inch all series. You could see him reaching for it over and again on Friday morning, when he bowled pretty damn well without getting the break he needed. It was the distance between the ball and the off bail when he beat Khawaja with one that nipped back over the stumps, and again between the ball and the outside edge when Khawaja threw a loose drive at a wide one. It was the gap between the top of Steve Smith’s bat and the ball when Smith played a lazy cut, and again when he offered a crooked prod to a short one that nipped away from him.
It’s not clear where Anderson might find that inch or if he even knows where to look for it. He has bowled more balls than any other quick in Test history and is a master of the minute calibrations of finger and wrist involved in his sort of bowling. But this summer has been one long reminder that his art remains something of a mystery even to him – “An imperfect science” he calls it – and though he’s come closer to mastering it than anyone else alive, parts of it are still beyond his grasp.
In that first Test they put it down to rustiness, Anderson hadn’t bowled in the previous five weeks because he’d been recovering from a groin injury suffered during a championship match in May. Afterwards, Anderson himself blamed the pitch, which he described as being “like kryptonite”. There has been talk about the ball, whether it may be a bad batch to bowl with and the softly softly way the Australians have been playing him. His pace is the same as ever, about 82mph, the ball tracking data shows he is swinging it just as much as last summer. The only real difference anyone can spot is that he isn’t getting the ball to move off the seam as much as he used to.
And behind it all, the grim suspicion that age has caught up with him, that he’s simply gone on one series too long. Anderson hates that idea. He could die when he was 99 and his tombstone would say, “My age had nothing to do with it”. It was only in February that he was top of the ICC’s world bowling rankings and at the start of this series he was second, behind Ravi Ashwin. His frustration with that and almost everything else about the way this series has panned out is obvious. You can sense him straining for the breakthrough and the harder he tries, the stiffer his bowling looks, the more time the batsmen seem to have to play him.
By stumps, Anderson had bowled 138 overs in this series, and taken five for 371, the last of them Mitchell Marsh, who chopped the ball into his own wicket, a dismissal which Anderson celebrated with palpable relief, and which was greeted with a warm roar of support from the crowd. It brought his average for the series down to 74, which is the worst he’s ever had in any series in England. The overs have been cheap, though, going at 2.65 each, and he’s bowled 32 maidens, which is as many as all nine Australian bowlers have managed between them in five Tests.
You wondered then if it was all going to click for him, but no, he’s still waiting for his bowling to snap back into place. And maybe, like the rest of us, he’s worrying whether it ever will.
