You could find a fun little fact wherever you looked. On commentary as Jimmy Anderson celebrated his milestone moment was his old pal Graeme Swann, who began his Test career five years after the quick and retired a decade ago; in-between that, the off-spinner became one of England’s greatest bowlers.
Alastair Cook, who made his Essex debut after Anderson’s first World Cup campaign, paid his tributes in the TNT studio. “What he’s done is a joke,” said the former England captain. Sat next to Cook was Steven Finn, who had a fine fast-bowling career himself, taking 125 Test wickets before the knee played up. Anderson took 156 before Finn’s first game and has 237 since his last. Finn marvelled at the achievement because he knows just how hard this thing is: the worn-out limbs, the physio on speed-dial, the lengthy grind that facilitates that fleeting and momentous eruption of an uprooted stump. “In the foothills of the Himalayas, he’s reached an insurmountable summit for a fast bowler in Test-match cricket,” Finn proclaimed.
And so you can understand why 600 Test wickets was once solely the domain of spinners, Muttiah Muralitharan, Shane Warne and Anil Kumble forming the triumvirate for 12 years before Anderson became the first seamer there in 2020. That, you felt at the time, would be the last hundred, particularly when he was discarded two years ago for a tour of the Caribbean as part of a post-Ashes shake-up. Instead, Anderson went all Leonardo DiCaprio as Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street: “I’m not leaving.” Since his return there have been 60 wickets at 25.91.
But in Dharamsala, by a screensaver-type backdrop and in his 187th Test match, the only number that mattered was 700, brought on with a simple setup. Kuldeep Yadav, whose shapes at the crease belie his position as a No 9, was met with a sharp 85mph bouncer that rattled his glove. A fuller delivery followed, the seam running close to horizontal, inviting the forward prod, the line moving away, the edge induced, the catch swallowed by Ben Foakes. History. And also what England had needed early in the day after Kuldeep and Jasprit Bumrah had frustrated them the previous evening.
Shoaib Bashir, 20 years young, had Bumrah stumped a few minutes later to celebrate the second five-wicket haul of a career that has rapidly accelerated in the last few weeks. But he still made sure that the seamer led England off the field, allowing Anderson to step over the rope first and take in the adulation. Bashir, of course, wasn’t even alive when Anderson took his first Test wicket at Lord’s, accounting for Zimbabwe’s Mark Vermeulen.
The romantic argument is that this is all ill-fitting, that Anderson’s landmark shouldn’t have come in a thumping innings and 64-run loss but in a victory at home, perhaps from his own end at Old Trafford. That argument would be flawed. Getting to this point has come from taking in all the suffering, perhaps even extracting some strange enjoyment from it. Why else summon the spirit for another tour of India, where the tweakers headline and no visitors have come out victorious in a series since 2012?
Anderson has watched batting collapses across decades now and, for some odd reason, still unfurls himself from his changing-room seat, straps up his spikes and says: “Yeah, I’d like some more of this.” This was his 68th Test defeat, a career of losing that exceeds Matthew Hoggard’s entire haul of Test appearances. His status as a No 11 means he’s the man stationed for the denouement, forced to be the first to shake hands and say well done. This time he was, at the very least, unbeaten, watching from the other end as Joe Root slapped Kuldeep to long-on. This can’t be enjoyable, right?
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His series was an odd one, missing the victory at Hyderabad before thriving as the lone seamer in Vizag with five wickets while giving little away. Yashasvi Jaiswal took him back to the white-ball days, disposing him for three consecutive sixes at Rajkot. He was underbowled in Dharamsala, not used enough as a defensive weapon to tighten things up, overprotected because, well, he can’t do everything he did a few years ago. The ideal for England would have been to have Ollie Robinson play a more prominent role and underline why he should be manning this attack in the future. Instead, the 41-year-old’s body remains more reliant than the 30-year-old’s.
It remains a tiresome and futile exercise trying to figure out when it will all finish, so we may as well have a bit of fun assuming that it won’t. The gaps have gotten longer between Anderson’s milestones: 400 to 500 wickets took two years, the next hundred took three, the one after close to four. So 800 at the age of 46? Sounds like a lot of suffering.
