Cricket: Anderson joins the 500 club
“In the end, the West Indies simply could not live with Jimmy Anderson,” said Lawrence Booth in The Mail on Sunday. On Friday evening, in the second innings of the third Test, the 35-year-old became the first England bowler to take 500 Test wickets; then, the next day, he took seven wickets for 42 runs – the best figures of his extraordinary career. England’s batsmen “ensured Anderson’s artistry” did not go to waste, securing a ninewicket victory and a 2-1 series win “that has been harder work than anyone imagined possible”. At the end of his first season as captain, Joe Root managed to avoid an upset, and could take pride in “a pair of series triumphs”. And he owed much of that success to Anderson, whose 39 Test wickets this summer – a tally beaten by only one England cricketer, Jim Laker in 1956 – put him back on top of the world rankings, and proved that he is “the greatest swing bowler the game has known”.
By their mid-30s, most cricketers are in decline, said Scyld Berry in The Sunday Telegraph. Not Anderson: he just “keeps on getting better and better”. He has always been an astonishingly reliable bowler, taking at least 40 Test wickets in eight of the last ten years. Yet he has been at his most deadly this summer, conceding just 15 runs per wicket. What’s the secret to Anderson’s “glorious longevity”, asked Ed Smith in The Sunday Times. Having settled, early in his career, on a technique “he could trust”, he has resisted the urge to meddle with it unnecesarily, relying on a smooth action that “takes relatively little out of him” physically. And he has avoided the mistakes of those bowlers who “bulk up in the gym with mindless weights training”, taking years off their careers; instead, he makes the most of his “lean, athletic” physique, and understands that “rest and recovery matter just as much as sweat and tears”.
Anderson wasn’t the only bowler who thrived this summer, said Jonathan Liew in The Daily Telegraph. This is “Test cricket’s most bowlerfriendly year in a generation”: there have been fewer runs and fewer centuries than in any year since 2000. In this Test, for instance, wickets “fell faster than the pound” – 23 of them in the first two days – while just two batsmen scored half-centuries. Local factors have played a part: in England, a wet summer has offered encouragement to seam and swing bowlers; in Bangladesh and India, “vicious turning wickets” were prepared for Australia’s batsmen. What’s clear, though, is that cricket is emerging from “a golden age of Test batsmen”: of the eight highest run-scorers in cricket history, seven have retired in the last five years. After the sport’s longest period of “batsman-dominance”, the bowlers are “finally fighting back”.