James Anderson's 100 Test wickets at Lord's are all the more impressive when you consider his shoulder pain
The pain in James Anderson’s shoulder, amassed over 15 years in international cricket, is so great that getting out of his seat after flights can be a struggle. It hurts when he puts a T-shirt on in the morning. It even hurts when he brushes his teeth.
“There have not been many occasions when I have bowled pain free,” Anderson wrote for Telegraph Sport in January. “Generally you are not 100 per cent.” When he bowls, Anderson takes ibuprofen to numb the pain.
Ledley King was the footballer who did not need to train. Whenever he played, King’s knees would puff up, leaving him in excruciating pain. King would be left unable to kick a ball, able only to swim lengths and work out in the gym. Yet, a week and no training later, King would take the field again - and perform supremely again.
Anderson prepared for the all-consuming rigours of a five-match Test series, played out in six weeks, by taking six weeks off, to rest his left shoulder. He only played a second XI match for Lancashire - specially arranged by his county - and a solitary first-class game. It was like preparing for the London marathon with a couple of light jogs in the local park. Yet, rather like King, Anderson has achieved such a rarefied level, both in his skills and shrewdness about how to deploy them, that he scarcely needs to train at all.
Facing Anderson at Lord’s is a transcendental challenge, one which goes far beyond what is normally demanded in elite sport. It is like playing Roger Federer at Wimbledon, Liverpool at Anfield on Champions League nights or Muttiah Muralitharan in Galle: a trial for which no amount of relentless training and rigorous analysis can ever truly prepare.
There is little mystique to facing Anderson at Lord’s. Where the challenge of Muralitharan lay largely in the sheer uncertainty over what to expect, those who encounter Anderson know exactly what beckons: full length deliveries which mostly swing away, and occasionally nip back. With Muralitharan the batsman’s struggle lay mostly in deciphering what the ball was going to do; with Anderson the ordeal is not working out what he has planned for you but rather in stopping it.
In the third over of India’s second innings, Murali Vijay correctly identified that a delivery was ducking back in. What he did not identify - or simply could not prevent - is how far the ball deviated off the seam and curved back to his inside edge. It was an apt way for Anderson to seal his 100th wicket at Lord’s, a bulk of which have been claimed through batsmen being telegraphed their downfall and then being powerless to stop it from coming to pass.
Facing Anderson under cloudy skies at Lord’s, there is no release, only a sense of slowly and irrevocably shuffling a little closer to your demise. It doesn’t matter which end he is bowling from - he uses the slope to manipulate the ball's course equally adroitly from both - or how batsmen approach him. Batsmen, traditionally the protagonists of cricket, come to feel like incidental extras in Anderson’s show.
And yet, for all the intricacy of these skills, perhaps the greatest marvel of Anderson is simply how he is still here, leading England’s Test attack at Lord’s into his 37th year. That he has vaulted to 170 Test wickets more than any Englishman to make their debuts before him attests to how meticulously Anderson has been managed by sports science, central contracts - especially since playing his last one-day international in the 2015 World Cup - and himself. Anderson even knows the differences between different kinds of pain, he explained recently: the pain that is simply an inevitable by-product of bowling, and the pain that spells injury.
There remains a sense that Anderson’s overall statistics, however extraordinary 553 wickets at 26.83 amounts to, still do not quite convey his mastery, distorted by the travails of his early years. Consider that Anderson’s last 405 wickets have come at 23.90 apiece: more Test wickets than Dennis Lillee managed in his entire career, and at a lower average, despite playing in an age when overall scores have risen. Going back to the start of 2015, Anderson has taken 173 wickets in 41 Tests at an average of 20.48: a triumph for his ceaseless spirit of self-improvement and self-knowledge.
As he walked up the stairs to the Lord’s pavilion, with match figures of 9-43 and guarding a stump that was the emblem of his moment of history, Anderson did so with a few more aches that will afflict him in the mundanity of normal life. These pains are the price of his greatness - and seldom has it been so wonderfully distilled.
