Jimmy Anderson loves bowling so much that even though he’s turning 42 this month and will walk out for his final Test for England on Wednesday at Lord’s, we still don’t know if that match is the last time we will see him bowl professionally.
He may carry on for Lancashire at the end of this season, he may even carry on for Lancashire next season. That is very unusual and it is testament to the fact he loves the art of bowling more than anyone I have played with. He loves the rhythm of running into bowl, the control of the technique of his action, the tactical side of whether he’s bowling away swing, inswing, wobble seam.
When you talk about professionals who have had longevity, you often talk about their dedication to training, their discipline in the gym and their diet. And of course you don’t play to 42 unless you have that but the thing that makes him different is his genuine love of the art of what he does. Addict is generally used as a negative word but I’d say he is an addict of the art of bowling.
It will all be about celebrating Jimmy this week but people shouldn’t forget the family behind him. My mum is extremely close with his parents and people don’t see the support he gets in the background from them, from his wife, Daniella, and daughters, Lola and Ruby.
His dad, Michael, and mum, Catherine, love going to the cricket. They’re quite nervous watchers but they would never pass that nervousness on to Jimmy. They never put pressure on him. They make the sport about joy and have done throughout, as have my mum and dad.
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Michael is very like Jimmy. He’s a Burnley fan, so me and my dad will go to Burnley v Forest with Michael and Jimmy and you’ll say, “Burnley have reached the Premier League, how excited are you, Michael?” and he’ll say, “Yeah, it’s alright isn’t it.” That’s Jimmy as well. When you congratulate him on something like getting 700 Test wickets he’ll say, “Cheers, pal.”
Jimmy and I have grown closer and closer over the years. We first played together in a World Cup game against the West Indies in Bridgetown in 2007 when we were already out of the tournament. We were at the crease together, nine wickets down, when I hit the winning runs. We’ve never done that again!
Later that year we spent a bit of time together in Sri Lanka on the Test tour. Neither of us were really playing so we were mixing drinks and trying to keep everyone hydrated as much as you can. But we didn’t play together in the same Test side until the tour to New Zealand just after Christmas in early 2008. We’d lost the first game, which Jimmy and I didn’t play, and Michael Vaughan pulled us over on a cold day in Wellington, where the second Test was played. Vaughany was brilliant. He said we were both going to play and he said he wasn’t picking us for wickets but for energy and enthusiasm to bring to the game. That took the pressure off.
We won the second and third Tests, in Wellington and Napier. It was not quite the start of our partnership because he opened the bowling and I was first change, so it took a couple of years for us to be building pressure together. We had bowlers like Steve Harmison and Freddie Flintoff who would be bowling at the more crucial times.
It was in 2011, when England became No1 in the world, that we started to grow as a pairing. Our bowling coach, David Saker, had the big idea: that we shouldn’t bowl separately to try to prolong pressure but bowl together, not just with the new ball. So Andrew Strauss would bring us back on together in the middle of the day to try to build up pressure and take a wicket.
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We started fielding at mid-on and mid-off for each other’s bowling so we’d be communicating through our overs and through our spells. Over the past ten years of our careers we’d talk every three balls. At the start of a Test I’d leave him for four balls. I’d be the last person to tap him on the hand and say good luck and leave him for four balls to figure out his rhythm and what the ball was doing.
Then I’d ask him his thoughts and he’d say, “We’ve got to be a bit fuller on this” or “It definitely feels more wobble seamy than swing” or “He’s standing across his stumps so let’s drag him across for a couple of overs”.
Off the pitch our friendship developed too. To start with, Jimmy spent all his time with Cooky [Sir Alastair Cook] and Swanny [Graeme Swann] and I spent a lot of time with Matt Prior. Although we’d go out for dinner and socialise loads we didn’t have that one-on-one time that we had through the rest of our careers.
When Swanny retired in 2013-14 that’s when we started growing much closer and in the past seven or eight years we’ve spent an awful lot of time together. If all the lads are playing golf it’s generally me and Jimmy: the old buggers put together against the youngsters.
On tour he’s very much the darts guy, the cards guy. He’s not someone who sits in his room on his own. We play a lot of the card game nomination whist. Everyone gets involved — it’s a maximum of eight at a time and Zak Crawley is always self-proclaimed chairman and scorer. There is always a big crew playing that.
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He does play a bit of Xbox to try to stay in with the youngsters. We’ve all got that mate who’s good at everything and Jimmy’s my mate who’s good at everything. Apart from Xbox, although he still gives it a good go. Jofra Archer is the best at Xbox. If you have to put 10,000 hours in to become world class at something, he’s certainly on his way.
Because he knows he’s shy and a little bit scary, Jimmy set one of his goals to be the guy to go up and help to break down the barrier with new players and welcome a new bowler in. He’s definitely got better with that in recent years. And if you asked the young guys like Zak or Ollie Pope I’m sure they’d say he’s a good guy despite the age difference.
He’s developed so much as a player as well. Both of us were believers that bowling is a unique thing for the body and it needs your body to be used to it. Neither of us would want to go for more than two weeks or so without bowling. Some of the training is really soulless. You grab a box of six balls and you go into an indoor school on your own and bowl eight overs at low intensity just for your body to get a bit of hardening and a bit of grind.
Jimmy does a lot of body-weight resistance stuff in the gym but isn’t a big bench presser. He works a lot on mobility in the gym but bowling has always been crucial to our fitness levels because it is such a unique movement. It doesn’t have to be high intensity. During Covid I bought a small golf chipping net off Amazon and bowled into that in the garden. Jimmy is relentless in the indoor school at Old Trafford, bowling it into a net, picking it up, bowling into a net, picking it up.
Whereas I was always studying other bowlers, people like Curtly Ambrose and Shaun Pollock, he has such great natural ability; he is a trial-and-error bowler. He tries stuff in the nets — perhaps a shoulder twist or a technical tweak — and works on it until he gets it right.
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He has such a great skill set: regular swing, reverse-swing and wobble seam. He doesn’t get enough credit for his reverse-swing, which has been crucial to his great record in the subcontinent. Because his line and length are so immaculate it makes it lethal. Dale Steyn was phenomenal and quicker than Jimmy but Jimmy is certainly the best reverse-swing bowler I’ve played with and probably the best I’ve witnessed in the flesh outside of Steyn.
He disguises it brilliantly. He’ll run in covering the ball with his other hand so you can’t pick it that way and he doesn’t miss. He doesn’t get too greedy; he’s not aiming for inswinging yorkers or outswinging half volleys. He is just patient, moving it subtly, a half-bat width.
Mushtaq Ahmed was our spin bowling coach around 2013 and he would talk a lot about how Wasim Akram would do it and he came in to talk to the bowlers. Jimmy thrived off that. It has given him an amazing, unique selling point as it means he can move the ball conventionally and then can move the ball with reverse-swing abroad and that has been career defining for him. Looking back on training he’s the bowler who practises reverse-swing the most. In the nets he will pick up a reverse-swinging ball and work on the lines he’s bowling.
The other weapon in his armoury is the wobble seam. No one used to talk about it but some of the best bowlers in history, people like Ambrose, Courtney Walsh and Pollock, wobbled it. Wobble seam is presenting the imperfect seam; it is a faltering delivery with the seam wobbling not perfectly straight. As a bowler you don’t know which way it is going to seam after it lands, so the batsman has no chance of knowing. The development since the Ambrose era is that the best bowlers can generally swing it and wobble it now, not just one or the other.
My first memory of it being successful was when we went to Abu Dhabi and Dubai to play Pakistan in 2012 and the outfields were too lush to get reverse swing. We’d started talking about it with Saker, who mentioned that Stuart Clark, who had a really successful two years for Australia in Test cricket, did it and we looked at what he was doing. It came off in 2013 when he bowled Michael Clarke for a duck at Trent Bridge in the first Ashes Test with a delivery that angled in and seamed away and hit the top of off stump. From memory that was a wobble seam and we thought, “This could really suit us.”
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England put something on Instagram recently of Jimmy getting 11 wickets against Pakistan at Trent Bridge in 2010 — it was all swing. He’d be known as the King of Swing but he’s now a completely different bowler to what he was then. I bet you he’s got more wickets over the past six years with seam than swing.
That ability to adapt and learn is why he has been so successful for so long. In professional sport you have to be continually improving because there is always a younger bowler trying to get your shirt. It is that genuine love for the art of bowling that has made him want to improve and learn new deliveries. It’s why he will go out at Lord’s this week as England’s greatest ever bowler.
England v West Indies
First Test, Lord’s
Wednesday – Sunday
TV Sky Sports
