James Anderson: A gift modern cricket has not cherished enough

James Anderson surpassed Sir Ian Botham’s tally of 383 Test wickets

With the loud and pompous cacophony that the coverage of a certain Twenty20 ‘festival’ has been reduced to, you’d trade your right hand for some much-cherished puristic relief. But not even a Test match between two of the most traditional powerhouses of red ball cricket can suffice when being played on a drab, placid Antigua wicket, inevitably producing a stalemate.

Many feel England skipper Alastair Cook spent too much time buying safety and not leaving sufficient overs for his bowlers to run through an inexperienced but resolute West Indies line-up. England did make some early inroads on the final day that inched them closer to victory, but the West Indies did not give in. At a reasonably uninteresting stage in the game, Cook threw the ball to his most trusted warrior from Lancashire.

Few bowlers in the international circuit have perhaps relied so less on their pace and yet survived for over a 100 Test matches. It takes some real doing to develop your skill and fine tune your craft when pace isn’t your inherent virtue. James Anderson is one such bowler. The lanky figure that he cuts may hardly ever have intimidated a batsman while running in. And yet, his bowling has often made the best in the trade dance to its tunes.

Anderson means business straight away, keeping things tight outside the off stump. There’s occasionally one that comes back in, while his short ball is always in the mix as a mode of surprise for the batsmen. Denesh Ramdin and Jason Holder face one over each into the spell. So far, they’ve negotiated Anderson pretty well. The release has been read accurately and the bowler has failed to test their off stump.

By now, Anderson has more than realized the wicket is not going to offer any assistance, and that putting doubt in the batsman’s mind is the only means to meet ends. Third over of the spell, and Anderson reworks his wrist position. The grip changes. No longer is the seam held across. The leg cutter release has been well spotted by Ramdin and he prefers not flirting with one leaving his off stump.

The need to make him play is recognized by the bowler. Following up, Anderson delivers a second straight leg-cutter, this time the length being a tad shorter. The ball rises on Ramdin more than he’d have expected and the late movement takes a good thick edge of the wood. Cook does the rest, as he so often has. Anderson does a euphoric jump. Every teammate goes ecstatic.

Playing your 100th Test is perhaps the biggest honour in a cricketer’s career. The joy only grows with a minor statistical update that now places you at the summit on the list of your country’s highest wicket-takers. In the background, Sir Ian Botham stands up in appreciation. A little nod of acknowledgement is sufficient for the great man to stamp his approval on a famous achievement.

********

The amount of effort Anderson was forced to put into reaching that coveted number on the final day of the Antigua Test, his persistence finally being rewarded, was pretty symbolic of his career at large. He has been the leader of the pack for nearly a decade now and considering the enormously demanding English calendar, the kind of workload he’s carried has seldom been appreciated.

Factor in the unresponsive wickets of the modern game and you can judge his impact and skill far better. But to truly appreciate the gift Anderson has been to modern day cricket, you’ve got to take a closer look at the finer nuances of swing bowling and its subtle variations, always keeping a batsman in check.

That the Englishman is not the quickest with the new ball in his hand is common knowledge. He’s nowhere near as quick as the Dale Steyns of the game, let alone the Mitchell Johnsons and the Morne Morkels. And yet, there’s something to be said about the fact that few batsmen find the sight of Anderson running in with the red cherry a pleasant one.

There’s a reason Cook doesn’t come across as a man who doesn’t choose his words well, and he has repeatedly asserted that Anderson is the most skilful bowler in the world. There’s something to be said about the skill that makes a hitherto high-flying Virat Kohli, with the world at his feet, look a novice in the game, struggling to be sure of his off-stump while facing the man from Burnley.

What could possibly be so hard about reading the seam right when delivered at such a gentle pace, the bounce hardly ever enough for the ball to whizz past your ears? Sure, it sounds like a proposition any batsman would happily take as opposed to facing thunderbolts from Johnson. But with Anderson, there are a few caveats to this proposition, and most batsmen aren’t fond of those.

The modern day batsmen do not like the idea of having to resist their natural temptation to drive, and Anderson’s accuracy at hitting the right lengths and generating late movement perpetuates their dilemma. The Englishman does not mind dropping a couple too full, for as long as the batsman is willing to take chances against his outswingers, he’s more than sure of trapping him in the crease against an odd one moving towards him.

Unlike his predecessors from the Botham generation, the outswinger came much more naturally to Anderson than the one coming back in to the right-hander – he spent some seasons mastering that one. But ever since assuming the role to lead the English attack, Anderson has been an equally dangerous exponent of both.

Holding the seam upright, the skill he applies makes the new ball move, defying all laws known to physics, and even the technically astute ones have failed to stay measured in their approach, inevitably nicking one moving away. His ability with the new ball doesn’t drop one bit against the left-handers either. The seam is held scrambled while the length is subtly shortened, forcing the batsman to play away from the body. On more placid tracks, he doesn’t even mind straight away going around the wicket against the left-handers with a more pronounced wrist position at the release, extracting more movement off the seam.

During the years of his peak in international cricket, Anderson has been at his imperious best with the old ball. The prodigious amount of reverse that he generates off the rough side of the surface makes it tremendously hard for the batsmen to read the line. In addition to the inward aerial movement, the ball does its bit off the surface, often straightening enough to kiss the outside half of the right hander’s bat or at times even beating him in defence.

The dismissals of Sachin Tendulkar at Kolkata in 2012 or Michael Clarke at Nottingham in 2013 (arguably his career-best performance) immediately strike your memory. The magnificent art of reverse that he has perfected has ensured Anderson has delivered series defining performances on the subcontinental wickets – popularly perceived as graveyards for seam bowlers.

********

But it’s not always been the most joyous of rides for Anderson. After a dream start to his Test career, it took him some years to cement his place in the side. He failed to make the cut in Duncan Fletcher’s famous Ashes winning side of 2005 – a team that continues to hold a monumental place in English cricket’s folklore. Anderson failed to find a place in Fletcher’s ensemble cast of a four-pronged seam attack that brought the mighty Australians down on their knees. Looking in retrospect, the kind of bowler Anderson went on to become is perhaps a cross between the Matthew Hoggard and the Simon Jones of 2005.

It could be argued that had the class of 2005, for a variety of reasons, not faded away as rapidly as it did, Anderson would have had to spend quite a few more years as an understudy to them and may perhaps have spent his peak in the sidelines. Instead, he managed to outlast all his peers and found an understudy himself in Stuart Broad.

The two have opened the bowling for a number of years now and their partnership has yielded considerable success for England. In fact, they are only the third pace pair to take a combined tally of 500 Test wickets – the other two being Curtly Ambrose & Courtney Walsh and Wasim Akram & Waqar Younis.

James Anderson has formed a deadly combination with Stuart Broad over the years

It’d take an interesting debate to find Anderson’s place among England’s all time greats. Popular belief is despite the superior numbers to his credit, Botham was not necessarily a better bowler than some of his illustrious predecessors and Anderson may well retain that public opinion.

Among many others, Alec Bedser, Sydney Barnes, Harold Larwood, Fred Trueman, Bob Willis and Brian Statham feature as some of the greats the country has produced. Of them, Barnes and Trueman are widely considered two of the greatest the game has ever seen. And while it will be a stretch to place Anderson at that pedestal, but a notch immediately below theirs is where he should reserve himself a place in a rather eminent company of England’s finest.

It will be even more interesting to find how Anderson compares against some of his contemporaries or even the ones from the not so distant past. The likes of Akram, Ambrose, Glenn McGrath, Younis, Walsh, Allan Donald, Shaun Pollock and Dale Steyn will make it to any list of the greatest fast bowlers of the last two decades.

Anderson’s career stats pale in comparison against any of theirs. His underwhelming career average that has barely managed to stay under 30 is hard to overlook, but so is his impact on some of the biggest series results in the modern era for England.

From the list of aforementioned bowlers, Anderson’s skill, approach and impact warrant a fair comparison with Pollock, and while the numbers will certainly lean in the South African’s favour, there are several striking similarities in the kind of bowlers they’ve been.

Among his more modern contemporaries of the day, Anderson would merit a place in the same bracket with the Australian duo of Ryan Harris and Mitchell Johnson – albeit Harris’ career has been a disappointingly brief one which is a huge pity.

The British media have historically had a reputation of overrating their own and that often results in the players inviting unwarranted contempt from the rest of the world. Anderson perhaps best exemplifies this phenomenon.

Although he has some miles to tread before claiming a place among the greats of the game, he also has been denied a fair share of plaudits that he’d be quite worthy of. Also, the fact that England’s brand of cricket has mostly been unimaginative and bland has meant that they’ve hardly ever been the neutrals’ favourites. And that view does percolate and extend to individual players too.

But in all fairness, Anderson’s is a modern day cricket legend that needs to be more reverently talked about. He may not have been the most consistent of performers and discipline is not his strongest suit, but a wider repertoire of skills than most bowlers of his time more than makes up for his shortcomings.

The next 10 months are going to be a critical period for English cricket, one that determines the course the team takes for the years to come. Anderson’s importance in sailing through these times unscathed cannot be stated enough. Given the amount of workload and pressure he’s going to put himself under and the fact he’s not getting any younger, he may not come out of it the same bowler.

Enjoy it while it lasts. There aren’t too many of his quality around.