‘3 Lions’ GOAT: Anderson reverses ball, and age
NEW DELHI: The scoreboard may suggest that spinners Dom Bess and Jack Leach were the principal assassins. It may also reflect that Joe Root batted the home side out of the game. But, for those who watched what happened, it is perhaps fitting that India were handed a rare home Test defeat — only their fourth in a decade — on the back of a devastating final-day spell from an ageless fast bowler.
At 38, after 18 years of cricket for England, Jimmy Anderson is simply continuing with a barely believable vein of form which saw him become the most prolific fast bowler in Test history in 2018. Nothing seems to stop him — not age, for sure; not the inevitable loss of pace; certainly not the conditions.
On fast, bouncy pitches, Anderson uses the seam to deadly effect, coupled with his absolute mastery over line and length. Give him a dusty, tired and slow Chepauk pitch and he makes the ball sing with reverse swing. He can force batsmen to play on the front foot on a pitch that has nothing for bowlers. He has the uncanny ability to use reverse swing both ways — the traditional one that jags in to the right-handed batsman, but also one that moves away at the last moment.
He hides the ball with his other hand — a new trick he’s started using recently — leaving batsmen with little option but to do what Shubman Gill did in Chennai by stepping forward with a straight bat. The ball swerved and snuck through the miniscule gap between bat and pad and sent the off stump into a
cartwheel. Ajinkya Rahane was done in by a replica in the same over. And with those two deliveries, the match was virtually over, setting the stage for England’s 227-run win.
There is no other cricketer playing now for any team who has featured in four Test victories against India in India. It’s just what Anderson does. He has played a critical role in not one but three victorious Ashes campaigns, and he had begun his Test career with a fifer on debut.
Yet, like all long careers, he has had his share of struggles.
Soon after his debut he was shunted into the background, at best used as a net bowler. He worked on changing his action, lost both pace and accuracy. An injury kept him out for most of 2006. The very next year, Anderson came back into cricket a transformed bowler — not a tearaway with raw aggression any more, but a bowler with an unmatched arsenal of weapons.
In England, he marked his second coming with a sevenwicket haul in an innings against New Zealand. By 2010, he had also found an accuracy that made him nearly unplayable. He showed that off on the grandest stage, picking up 24 wickets in the 2010-11 Ashes tour of Australia to hand England the urn.
It is also fitting that in 2018, Anderson went past Glen Mcgrath’s record for most Test wickets by a fast bowler with the wicket of Mohammed Shami in a 4-1 rout over India — it was his 564th wicket, and he had taken more of those against India than any other opponent.
It established his credentials as England’s GOAT (greatest of all time) — at least in the bowling department. And from 564 to 611 — Rishabh Pant in Chennai — Anderson, if it’s possible, only seems to be getting sharper.