‘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