Ability to adapt is why 600 is in sight
He keeps on getting better and better. Not content with taking 500 wickets, James Anderson skittled out West Indies to record the best innings analysis of his entire Test career, seven for 42. Only 94 to go for his 600.
It is an unhealthy over-dependence which England have built up on their 35-year-old opening bowler. It would have been better for England if, ahead of the Ashes, Chris Woakes, Mark Wood and Jake Ball had stepped up to the plate this summer.
But, largely through injury, they have not – and Anderson has done more than fill the bill.
Has he bowled a bad ball this summer? The stats suggest not, or at least a minimal few. In the seven Tests – four against South Africa, three against West Indies – Anderson has taken 39 wickets at only 14.10 runs each. No England pace bowler has recorded better figures for a home season since the Second World War, because Anderson surpassed Sir Ian Botham’s aggregate of 37 wickets at 14.75 in 1978, when – whisper it quietly when in earshot of Beefy – Pakistan fielded a virtual second XI in their three Tests because their principal batsmen, like Zaheer Abbas and Javed Miandad, had gone to play World Series Cricket.
Politicians and clerics become more formidable with age, not English pace bowlers – other than Anderson. He keeps on improving because he is not set in his ways but learns and adapts. So, in West Indies’ second innings, after Anderson had taken his first two wickets from the Pavilion End and been warned twice by umpire Marais Erasmus for running on the wicket, he switched to the Nursery End and took five more wickets, well before a second new ball was to hand.
Anderson even dismissed Shai Hope, the new West Indian world-class batsman, with a ball that moved down the slope straight after lunch when Hope’s feet were not perhaps moving as decisively as they had beforehand.
A few hours after the third Test ended, the final of the Caribbean Premier League was scheduled to be staged at the Brian Lara Stadium in Trinidad, but it is to be hoped that aspiring batsmen in the West Indies will have been inspired by their new role model in Test cricket, as well as by the T20 specialists of Trinbago Knight Riders, captained by Dwayne Bravo,
and St Kitts and Nevis Patriots, captained by Chris Gayle.
Hope has everything it takes on the evidence of this series. He scored more runs, 375, than anybody else on either side. He batted on a higher plane than anyone at Headingley, even Kraigg Brathwaite, and on a higher plane than anyone at Lord’s, even Ben Stokes. It was so simple for him: he either left the ball or hit it, often with checked drives, the shot of self-restraint.
A feature of this series was the high number of dropped catches, 26. There is a connection between Anderson’s success and the dampish pitches – with plentiful cloud cover – which prevailed, other than in the first Test against South Africa at Lord’s, where the pitch turned. For the same reason the dankness and darkness – even before the floodlights had to be switched on at Edgbaston for the pink-ball Test – might account for some of the many misses, if not excuse them.
Stuart Broad has suffered greatly: he could have had far better figures than he ended up with had catching chances stuck, although he himself dropped two opportunities on the last morning of the series. Yet Hope has not needed such good fortune. The one time he was dropped, by Alastair Cook at Headingley, he had already reached 106 in his second innings and had propelled West Indies to the cusp of their sensational victory by five wickets.
One world-class cricketer can transform a side by driving up the standards of all around him. Hope can make West Indian Test cricket cool again; Hope is a link with the former greats. In the Caribbean, Hope can enable the present to look the past in the eye.