As Warner bids farewell, Anderson returns to the treadmill in India

While others leave the stage the 41-year-old heads to India for another assignment – but he needs to end his slump in form

A lone figure strides along a dark blue running track underneath forlorn Manchester skies. The clouds are thick enough to make the Beautiful South swoon and a cotton vest damp in a glance. The half-prised tuna can of the Etihad Stadium lurks in the background. A couple of weary floodlights strain against the gloom, the only things to break through the greyness of the scene the luminous orange trainers and bright blue knee socks sported by the solitary runner. “First track session of the year 💪🏃,” goes the caption. Richard Hawley croons in the background: “Love you and never be old, then we feel the hope … you leave your body behind you.” It’s a pointed choice of tune.

On the other side of the globe, another figure – shorter, stockier, clad in creamy white – is slowly walking off the sun-soaked turf at the Sydney Cricket Ground. Kissing the badge on his green helmet and holding his arms outstretched like a milkmaid’s shoulder yoke. He soaks up the applause from thousands of spectators, including family and friends, who have risen to him inside the stadium.

As one old cricketer leaves the crease, another prepares to get back to it. After 15 years at the international coalface, beguiling, dividing and entertaining not just the cricketing public in his own country but around the world, David Warner, aged 37, called time on his Test career last week. Warner made his Test debut in December 2011 by which time (the now 41-year-old) Jimmy Anderson was already into his third or fourth iteration of international fast bowler, a coiled-spring colossus who had dominated the Australian summer before Warner’s arrival, pocketing 24 wickets and leading England towards their first Ashes series win in Australia in 24 years … or five-eighths of a (current) “Jimmy”.

For Warner, a few years of lucrative Twenty20 franchise tournaments await, a cash-injected climbdown into full retirement some day in the not too distant future. For Anderson it is a case of more lonesome loops of the running track in an attempt to leave his body behind, or keep it at bay a bit longer, at least. More indoor sessions bowling at a stump as singular as his mindset, tinkering, tightening, Benjamin Button-ing his frame with the addition of multivitamins and boyish haircuts. For Anderson, India lies in wait. Five Tests in only seven weeks.

India is no place for a medium-pace swing bowler, not really, especially not a 41-year-old one. The heat and the bone-grinding nature of the pitches are enough to strike fear into the guts of the most battle-hardened quick, even those who can rely on searing pace to exploit and unsettle. And yet Anderson defies logic, curls a collagen lip at it and carries on regardless. Take his last visit to India, in 2021, when on the verge of turning 40, he took eight wickets at an impressively parsimonious average of 15.87, holding the line like a gnarled sentinel in the three Tests he played. Yet even Anderson at his most miserly couldn’t prevent England’s 3-1 series defeat.

During England’s landmark series win in India in 2012, Anderson was 30 and played all four Tests under the captain, Alastair Cook. His wickets column and average were higher (12 wickets at 30.25) but the seamer used all his accumulated wiles to jag and cut the ball off the Indian clay, ably supporting the spin of Graeme Swann and Monty Panesar to secure England’s first Test series win in India since 1984-85 (seven-tenths of a Jimmy).

In 13 Tests in India Anderson has an exemplary record, taking 34 wickets at 29.32, only three runs higher than his overall average across 183 Tests. Despite this, he heads to the subcontinent under something of a cloud, not gunmetal in hue as of yet but pointedly urn-shaped.

During the Ashes series last summer series Anderson cut an increasingly subdued figure, the seamer going as far as to describe the English pitches as “Kryptonite” while Mark Wood, Chris Woakes and most notably his bandana-clad comrade-in-arms over the past decade, Stuart Broad, did the business and prevented Australia from winning the series outright. Broad swapped the bails and bent the narrative towards a rousing and remarkable send-off at the Oval but Anderson dismissed any talk of his own retirement, saying Broad’s decision to call it a day spurred him on to keep going, despite a chastening summer. A return of five wickets in four Tests and – perhaps more pertinent – a summer-long inability to garner any meaningful movement on the same English pitches that have served him so well for nearly two decades.

Anderson rankles when asked about “the ‘R’ word” and is clearly putting the hard yards in, as he always has, for another stint in England’s attack. He’s also on record saying he would like to decide when the time is right to go, and plenty will say he has earned at least that. But sport doesn’t really work that way; its central tenets are spontaneity and unpredictability. You risk being burnt if you start to think it owes you something, even if, like Anderson, you have given it nearly everything you have.

In his desire to continue playing Test cricket Anderson, despite his longevity and unparalleled service, has put himself at the mercy of the selectors with a bruising Test series in India imminent. Broad and Warner have recently had their day in the sun, Cook and plenty more before them too. Anderson, for the time being, is marching on, leaving his body behind yet moving forward once again, head bowed against the gathering clouds.

Better to burn out than fade away?

There’s an old football joke that is attributed to the late Brian Clough. With one of his players having freshly made their international debut, Clough asked him: “Who played two games for England in one night?” Clough delivered the answer shortly afterwards: “You did – your first and your last.”

That Clough-ism is rooted in an inevitable truth for both amateur and professional sportspeople alike. Just as all are born and one day will die, it’s a certainty that once you’ve played your first game – be it football for England or cricket for the local village side – at some point, you’ll play your last.

Many professional sportspeople struggle in their post-retirement years, cricketers notably so. Perhaps it is the sheer amount of time playing and thinking about the game that makes the cessation, when it comes, impossible to bear for some. In the most recent series of the Nightwatchman podcast, Nick Compton speaks about how he struggled to come to terms with the transition into his post-playing career, describing the “rawness” of letting go of a game that he had played from the age of five. Countless other former professionals will be able to relate. Alastair Cook had a fairytale end to his Test career, finishing his final innings in front of a packed house at the Oval in 2018, scoring a memorable century to bookend his 161 Tests with hundreds after hitting a ton on his debut in Nagpur 12 years earlier. Cook played county cricket for five more seasons, retiring from all professional cricket at the end of last summer with a seemingly heavy heart.

“It is not easy to say goodbye,” he said at the time. “For more than two decades, cricket has been so much more than my job. It is the right time for this part of my life to come to an end. I have always given absolutely everything I possibly have to be the best player I could be … from the eight-year-old boy who first played for Wickham Bishops Under-11s to now, I end with a strange feeling of sadness mixed with pride.”

Some players can’t bear to cross a boundary rope again after parting ways with the game professionally. Geoffrey Boycott admitted that for a long time after his retirement he simply couldn’t bear to pick up a bat. “It didn’t feel like death exactly,” Boycott wrote of his last game of professional cricket, at Scarborough in September 1986, “but I did think a part of my life was finished.”

Quote of the week

“I’m actually happy to go up the top. I’m pretty keen if that’s what they want to do … I’m certainly interested for sure” – with the sweat barely dry on Davey Warner’s baggy green, Steve Smith admits he has his gimlet eye on a move to the top of the Australian Test batting order. That sound? A collective groan from opening bowlers the world over.

Memory lane

The all-conquering West Indies squad limber up on the outfield at Lord’s in May 1984, at the start of a tour in which Clive Lloyd’s side, widely regarded as one of the best to ever play the game, thrashed England 5-0 in a Test series and beat them 2-1 in the one-day international one.

Still want more?

Yorkshire’s sponsors must stand up to the return of Colin Graves, who dismissed racism as “banter” – or we are back where we started, writes Azeem Rafiq.

Simon Burnton analyses how Graves became the frontrunner to run Yorkshire again.

Geoff Lemon reflects on the career of David Warner, who exits the Test stage with a rich tapestry of chaos and artistry.

And while England’s Test series against India begins later this month, a TV deal in the UK has yet to be agreed.

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