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TOn the day Fred Trueman took his 300th Test wicket, he was asked if he thought anyone would ever beat his record. “Yes,” Truman said, “but they’ll be damn tired when they do.” Well, three dozen have been in the 60s since then, nine of them spinners, a trade with its own pains and difficulties, but 27- those fast bowlers among them are the ones who know deep in their own bones what fatigue Truman was Speaking of. There’s Dennis Lillee on 355, Wasim Akram on 414, Glenn McGrath on 563, Stuart Broad on 604 and then, outside of many of them, Jimmy Andersonat 700 and counting.
Anderson has one last summer of test cricket in front of him; chances are there aren’t many loopholes left to add. There could be a farewell test, or three, perhaps one at his home ground at Old Trafford, where he already has an end named after him. He will have a chance to beat Shane Warne’s total of 708 Test wickets and become second on the all-time list behind Muttiah Muralitharan. England will then bank on their younger, faster bowlers and proceed to the Ashes without him.
It’s a risk. Inevitably there will be times when they wish they had it back, when everyone watching will begin to question what they were ever thinking by retiring it. This will happen when the morning is wet and the dark clouds are blowing; when the pitch is flat, the sun is out and they need someone who can cut the ball to make it do something; when they’re 40 overs and wondering if the thing might just be ready to turn the swing; when the batsmen are on the attack and they just need someone to slow it all back down. Anderson can do it all, can still do most of it.
Is he tired? Maybe more than he shows, but you’d never know it by his looks. Last winter in India, he looked leaner than ever, his body lithe and sinewy, his hair fresh, and he was busy jogging. But there were fewer loopholes and they were further away. The batsmen were not as cautious as they used to be and the runs looked a little easier. He took three for 47 in the second Test at Visakhapatnam, but that was his only three-wicket haul in 12 months of Test cricket. There were six innings in which he did not take a wicket in 2023, as many in one year as he had in the three before they came together.
Anderson himself admitted that his place in the team was no longer certain, but you’d guess that, like everyone else, he felt that England would pick him when it mattered most.
It will be weird watching them play without him. He has been an unavoidable presence for several generations of cricket fans. Summer will come, the sun will come out at some point and before long Jimmy will be taking away some hapless tour batsman with a well-judged swinger. Breakfast, his shouts, the roar of the crowd, were a harbinger of the season, as well as the first ice cream bells. In all, he played in almost a fifth of all England’s Test matches, bowled, all by himself, a fair percentage (3.6) of every ball they ever bowled in almost 150 years of playing the sport. Its longevity is unprecedented in the modern era.
Anderson tied Truman’s 300 back in May 2013 (P Fulton c Swann b Anderson 2) and that was just the end of the start. He surpassed McGrath’s record in September 2018 (Mohammad Shami b Anderson 0) and that wasn’t even the beginning of the end. He went on for another five years and has since taken 136 more wickets. Overall, he has bowled more balls, taken more wickets, rubbed more boots and unwound more straps than any fast bowler in Test history, and it’s not even close. Broad, second in all respects, is still the best part of 100 wickets and 6,000 balls behind him.
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However, there was more art than effort. Frank Tyson, who bowled as fast as any Englishman ever, described the “emergence of guile” as a kind of creeping paralysis for the fast, “externally deliberate and artful methods add to the quick’s arsenal and make him a complete, shrewd, mechanically perfect athlete, but internally trickery undermines the physical foundations of the edifice of fast bowling until it takes away the real desire and reasons for wanting to bowl fast”. Anderson went the other way. He was fast enough in his wild years, but the “coming of cunning,” as Tyson describes it, was his making. By the end he could do things with the ball that made the old bowlers whistle.
By which his career will be remembered. He was the hardest working bowler in the business and the most skilful, a master of the old English tricks of swing, seam and cut. At some point this summer, he’ll be asked if his record will ever be bettered like Truman’s in ’64. The honest answer, if he does, is probably not. They play fewer Tests these days and the Twenty20 circuit means players have too many other temptations. Anderson’s fast bowling records will stand as those of Muralitharan and Don Bradman while the game is played. There will never be another.
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