Test cricket will lose a part of itself when England’s elder statesman retires and, while it will survive, it will be painful“Oh mother, I can feel the soil falling over my head.” A few weeks ago English cricket was thrown into a medium-sized spasm by the news that Jimmy Anderson had sustained a groin injury playing for Lancashire against Somerset. On one level it felt faintly ridiculous that England’s Ashes chances should rise or fall on the fitness of a man old enough to have bowled at Derek Randall. But the predominant sensation was really a kind of paralysing fear: the sort that grips you when you hear that an elderly relative has fallen over at home. Everyone knows the...
England’s talismanic bowler caught the guts of Old Trafford with an around-the-wicket beauty to dismiss Dean ElgarThe James Anderson End – an elegy in four words. Or six balls. Except it isn’t. There is nothing elegiac about James Anderson, despite entering his fifth decade, despite his 100th home Test, despite a touch of grizzlement about the beard. He has got 664 Test wickets under the belt and is taking a smart right turn straight towards the next milestone.This could be his last Test at Old Trafford. Except it won’t be. The fourth Ashes Test next July has his name all over it, as he stands slim as a broom handle at the end of his mark, white wristbands dipped in...
England’s greatest bowler has benefited from his country’s focus on Test cricket and the fear is we will not see his like againFor many years there was a Jimmy Anderson poster on the back of London buses advertising a well-known brand of bro-vitamins, the kind of everyday pill that makes men happy, toned, slabbed, thickly coiffured, good at sport, magnetic in social situations and frankly – if I can speak plainly here – stone cold model-handsome. The advert seems to have gone now which is a shame because it was very funny. What made it work was the strapline “I FEEL FANTASTIC”, pasted in throbbing alpha-dog script over a picture of Anderson staring balefully into the camera, looking chiselled and...
For the new England Test coach Brendon McCullum, the job will be feeling a lot bigger now than it did this time last weekSome time in the middle of the afternoon Brendon McCullum quit his position on the balcony, where he had been sitting all through the morning, and disappeared back into the pavilion. He was gone for an hour or so, long enough that you started to wonder if he had clocked that he still had time to make the quarter-to-nine flight from London Heathrow which, with a couple of changes in Dubai and Melbourne, could have had him back in New Zealand by three o’clock Monday morning. Given the way the game was going at the time, he...
After three days of absurdist back and forth, the first Test ended with England calmly and efficiently knocking off the runsWhen the Jubilee Line tube is within a few stops of St John’s Wood on a Lord’s weekend, there tends to be some indistinguishable moment the personnel completely changes. Should you drift into your phone for a fraction too long you might then look back up and the general public throng will have been replaced by men in tailored suits, one arm holding on to the rails, staring each other square in the eyes, networking intent lurking underneath the gleam. This year New Zealand fans are there too, in 20‑year‑old Black Cap shirts as a sign they come in peace,...