James Anderson, forever 0*. Perhaps that’s how it was always supposed to end for England’s accidental greatest Test No 11. Not out for the 114th time – 53 more than anyone else. He’d done his bit. As usual, it was everyone else who stopped that century the game has long owed him.
At Lord’s on Thursday, Anderson trudged out of the pavilion discomfited by pads, caught in the crossfire of adoring veneration he resents, to partake in an activity he loathes.
Less than five minutes later he was back in the Long Room, after feigning a deft reverse-sweep and watching some tyro 18 years his junior face four balls. This had, all things considered, gone as well as he could have hoped.
Cricket is a bizarro sport, not least because it unifies two fundamentally unrelated skills – batting and bowling share no common ground. No-one ever asked Michael Jordan to whip out his watercolours after a game, and equally little is known about Pablo Picasso’s proficiency from the three-point line.
For Anderson, batting has been an exercise in survival and sacrifice. He batted because bowling provides his life meaning. He batted to support his friends and protect his country.
This was about duty and endurance, penance to the same cricketing gods which blessed him with an indomitable talent and unimagined longevity. There are days against vindictive fellow quicks that the Burnley Lara batted (in the loosest sense of the term) because he loved bowling more than he loved himself.
It’s somewhere between disrespectful and tragic that more is not made of Anderson’s storied career with the bat. Not because he was particularly great, but because he did it anyway. One of cricket’s proudest men signed himself up for ritual humiliation on a regular basis, facing more balls as a Test No 11 than anyone else.
Anderson’s batting average is just shy of 9, which only three England players with more than 10 Test appearances have failed to better since 2003. That drops to 6.4 since the start of 2015. There’s no doubt one of England’s most naturally gifted bowlers is also one of its least naturally gifted batters.
And despite this, he salvaged multiple Tests with his Gray-Nicolls through a sheer hatred of losing and desire to be bowling once again. He has faced five of the top seven all-time Test wicket takers and still managed one fewer Test six than Michael Atherton (three to four). In a bizarre exhibition of his resilience and friability, he both went 53 innings from his debut without being dismissed for a duck and is the only Englishman ever to suffer the ignominy of a king pair.
As he’s approached and crossed 40, Anderson’s game has been increasingly stripped back, leaving us with acoustic Jimmy, just a man and his music. With the bat, that’s meant an accepting his reactions and eyes now struggle to process fast bowling, resulting in a focus on facing spin. This explains his glorious late-career reliance on reverse-sweeping.
Given right-handed Anderson already bats left-handed, reverse-sweeping is effectively a convoluted return to the norm, something so violently mutated it ends up back where it started. But a man who plays golf right-handed has long established he’s better facing a moving ball with his left, and that reverse-sweeping is his most effective form of defence. This is about subsistence, not style – and god it’s fun.
While you can point to a veritable catalogue among 265 innings – not least the 2009 Ashes draw at Sophia Gardens alongside Monty Panesar – two consecutive Tests in 2014 define Jimmy the batter. The first is a 100-run defeat to Sri Lanka at Headingley, the second a draw with India at Trent Bridge.
Against Sri Lanka, Anderson joined Moeen Ali at the crease with 20.2 overs until close of play and a draw the obvious target. The valiant tailender took guard against 54 balls in Leeds without scoring, simply throwing his body and bat wherever it needed to be. With just two deliveries remaining in the match, Jimmy wildly blocked a snorter into Rangana Herath’s hands at backward square. Our hero had lived long enough to become the villain. He was inconsolable.
Three weeks later in Nottingham, on a pitch so planar it should have triggered flat-earth conspiracies, Anderson reverse-swept and cut his way to 81. It is still the third-highest Test score ever by a No 11, as part of the highest tenth-wicket partnership ever.
“Of all the statistics, that will be my favourite,” he said. “I did start to feel like a proper batsman after a while.”
But, as he wrote in his book, batting at No 11 is a cruel craft. “You’re not even allowed to grieve,” he said. “There are not many more soul-destroying things than having to go out and try to take wickets on a pitch you’ve just scored 81 on.”
He hasn’t hit more than 20 in the decade since.
In fact, four years after that came Anderson’s lowest moment with bat in hand. In sun-kissed footage, a portly TV host hobbles over a luscious village wicket, before looping the rankest feasible red grenade at Jimmy – 30mph at best – which he somnabulantly punches to slip.
If this were the sort of event which merited a scorecard, it would read: Anderson 0 (1), caught Flintoff, bowled Corden. Baby shoes for sale, never worn, etc.
And there will always remain something wonderfully incongruous about the bowler who has done more than any other to evolve and adapt, to learn and master and perfect his craft, ignoring the other necessary part of cricket. He’s said on the Tailenders podcast that the one change he would make in his career is spending more time on his batting, but our joy was often derived from his suffering.
There’s always something of the untapped potential in being a No 11, the runs you could have scored if your partner could just have done their job too. But after 21 years with Anderson, you get the sense of a rare tailend life well lived, someone who took the road less travelled and made it home. He will retire as not only an indubitable bowling deity, but perhaps the greatest No 11 ever. Forever 0* – what could’ve been?