As James Anderson stands on the cusp of immortality, ecb.co.uk's Andy Wilson charts his rise from Burnley to the top of England's wicket-takers.
It is months now since Sir Ian Botham first floated the magnanimous gesture of presenting James Anderson with some fancy wine when breaking the record for wickets taken by an England bowler in Test cricket.
The unusually long delay between Jimmy’s 380th wicket in his 99th Test – Cheteshwar Pujara caught behind at the Kia Oval in mid-August – and his entry to England’s elite 100 club in Antigua this week has only added to a feeling of inevitability about his cricketing immortality.
But there was nothing inevitable about that journey when he first emerged in the Lancashire first team in the summer of 2002 – a shy, lean teenager from Burnley who was slightly less highly regarded than Kyle Hogg, a contemporary from Saddleworth who had considerably more natural talent with the bat (sorry, Jimmy).
Nor was there anything remotely inevitable that he would even have a decent Test career when he won only two caps in 27 months between August 2004 and November 2006.
He had missed the glorious 2005 Ashes series – he was actually bowling at Andy Flower in a County Championship match at Old Trafford during the first Test of that series at Lord’s (Flower made a century, Jimmy took 0-140 from 36 overs) – and shared in the collective flogging as Australia claimed their revenge on home soil in the winter of 2006/07.
But now he stands comparison with Brian Statham as Lancashire’s greatest two fast bowlers. (Sorry to come over all parochial about this, but for a Lancastrian bowler to earn recognition alongside Statham is as special as it gets.
Jimmy has long since surpassed his total of 252 Test wickets, but he was brought up well enough, in general manners as well as an awareness of Lancashire cricketing history, to recognise that being bracketed with Statham is recognition enough).
I was lucky enough to meet Statham once, on the balcony of the old committee room at Old Trafford, when he was sprinkling his stardust on a junior representative fixture between North and South Lancashire sponsored by the Manchester Evening News.
He was lovely, modest, gentle, and wore his legendary status lightly. Jimmy will not have thought of this, he is not that type, but his phenomenal international record means that a young journalist who meets him in the new Emirates Old Trafford pavilion in a couple of decades time would do so with a similar sense of awe.
It is not only the wisdom of hindsight that made Jimmy special from the start. His performances in that remarkable winter of 2002/3, when he took 4-29 against Pakistan in a World Cup match in Cape Town less than a year since he had been playing Lancashire League cricket for Burnley, made that clear to an audience well beyond his native county.
Before then, there had been 6-41 against Somerset on a late summer day at Stanley Park in Blackpool, as this likely lad swung the ball irresistibly at a waspish pace. “He’s gold dust,” said the Somerset coach Kevin Shine, presciently.
But then, in the months and years after yorking Yousuf Youhana for a duck at Newlands, it all threatened to turn sour.
That is why it seems so fitting that Peter Moores will be in charge of the England team when Jimmy hopefully, surely, breaks Beefy’s record in the Caribbean – and that Ottis Gibson will be alongside him as the England fast bowling coach.
It’s a shame Mike Watkinson, Jimmy’s former second team captain and coach at Lancashire, and his great mate and fellow craftsman Glen Chapple can’t be there, too.
All four were namechecked by Jimmy in an interview at TGI Fridays in Sale – it’s a glamorous life we lead – to commemorate his recognition as one of Wisden’s Five Cricketers of the Year in 2009.
It was Moores who gave him and Stuart Broad the responsibility of leading the England attack in New Zealand in 2008, which meant a pretty brutal demotion for messrs Stephen Harmison and Matthew Hoggard. Anderson went on to forge a close and highly-effective relationship with David Saker, Gibson’s successor as the mentor to England’s fast bowlers. But it seems safe to assume that he will be happy with the selection of Ottis to resume the reins.
So what other memories of Jimmy? There was a hat-trick against Essex at Old Trafford in early 2003, including Nasser Hussain pinned lbw for a first-ball duck. There was that wonderful spell against Australia in Adelaide in the 2010-11 Ashes, watched on Sky in the early hours of a Manchester morning – weeks after Shane Warne had wondered aloud, mischievously and deliberately, in a Sky-promotional interview about Anderson’s ability to bowl effectively with the Kookaburra ball.
More recently, and in the flesh, a couple of contrasting performances at Trent Bridge. His Duracell bunny on the sweaty fifth morning of the first Ashes Test of 2013, when he bowled, and bowled, and bowled, from the Radcliffe Road End, and delivered, pretty much single-handed, a series-shaping victory for Alastair Cook’s team. Followed by, the following year, that equally unforgettable 81 in a 10th-wicket stand of 198 with Joe Root in the drawn first Test against India.
In more than a decade of dry, monotone interviews and press conferences, comfortably the best quote of the lot would be “Lunch came at the wrong time for me”, as Root struggled to stifle a laugh alongside him in the Trent Bridge squash court. At last, David Lloyd’s loyal and optimistic Lancastrian references to the Burnley Lara had been justified.
That Trent Bridge Test also included Jadeja-gate, and whatever happened in the pavilion staircases and corridors during that particular lunch interval, I am not going to pretend here that there have not been occasions when Jimmy’s on-field behaviour has not made me wince.
As a northerner, he would prefer honesty to hagiography. Probably his biggest contribution to Lancashire’s Championship season of 2011 was roughing up Yorkshire’s Joe Sayers, with mouth and ball, in a tense Roses Match at Aigburth. Eyewitnesses suggest his antics at Northampton last summer were even worse.
But as a living Lancastrian legend, he is still well in credit. There was just so much emotional baggage for Jimmy last summer – he had flogged himself so hard in the opening draw against Sri Lanka at Lord’s, then gone so close to salvaging another draw at Headingley with the bat, and he was desperate to do his bit for Moores and Cook in turbulent times.
He has been through his fair share of dark times, even in a glittering career, none more so than in that two-year period when he was encouraged to remodel the unusual action that had come naturally to him, and suffered back problems as a result. To come back from that has required countless hours of graft, and huge mental strength as well as those natural skills. That is why this record-breaking achievement, inevitable as it now seems, should not ever be taken for granted.