A while back, in an attempt to preserve his sanity amid the deluge of swill and slander that populates his social media feeds, Jimmy Anderson decided to take advantage of the Twitter function that allows users to mute certain words and phrases. The list of banned terms provides a surprisingly acute insight into the psyche of a bowler who, on some level, has played his entire career against the background noise of doubt and scepticism, judgement and extrapolation.
“Australia” is one of the words Anderson has purged from his timeline. “Kohli” is another. Also: “injury”, “injured”, “done” and “finished”. “Reverse sweep” got muted after Indian fans gleefully celebrated Rishabh Pant swiping him for four in Ahmedabad a couple of years ago. If you tweet the phrase “worse than Steyn”, Anderson will not see it. And then there are the words that have followed England’s greatest fast bowler around like a plague of locusts: “cloud”, “clouds”, “Clouderson”.
India fans, in particular, delight in dismissing Anderson as a grey-sky bully who has spent two decades padding out his stats in overcast English conditions. This is of course a myth that got debunked some years ago: one that ignores his average of 27 in Asia, 27 and 23 on the last two Ashes tours, the wobble-seam clinic that helped win England the 2012-13 series in India. And above all the fact that Anderson hasn’t really been a classical swing bowler, in the commonly-understood sense, since his 20s.
His natural length is much shorter than many assume. Instead he probes the surface for clues, finds solutions, manipulates the seam position in his fingers and wrist with the miniaturised precision of a surgeon. There are scrambled-seam deliveries, deliveries designed to land on a certain part of the seam, deliveries where the seam is pulled downwards in an attempt to get it to swing before it moves off the pitch. There are things he does that we probably don’t fully understand yet, that science may not fully understand yet.
But somehow the more you refute a myth, the more stubbornly it clings on. And days like this, when the sky hangs low over London and the lights are on and the Lord’s stands hum tautly with their familiar hubbub, could have been purpose-built to gild it. There is a cool wet breeze in the air and a greenish tinge to the pitch. England win the toss and bowl. From the Pavilion End, Jimmy Anderson. Ladies and gentlemen: you know how this story goes.
Except this is how it goes. Anderson bowls 15 wicketless overs in three spells of unstinting accuracy but strictly limited threat. The most effective examples of swing bowling are in fact provided by the Ashes debutant Josh Tongue, who claims both Australian openers with massive in-duckers. When the new ball is taken late in the day, it is Ollie Robinson who is given first use of it and Stuart Broad the second. As stumps are drawn Anderson’s only mention on the scoreboard is the late catch he took at mid-off. His figures so far this series: 53 overs bowled, 138 runs conceded, one wicket taken.
We should probably make one thing clear before we go any further. There are no firm conclusions that can yet be drawn from any of this. Anderson is neither done nor finished. Nor is he injury, injured, Kohli or reverse sweep. He didn’t even really bowl badly. He induced at least half a dozen plays and misses, had a devilishly tough chance dropped by Joe Root at first slip, could have picked up Travis Head early in his innings with a skewed drive that dropped just sort of gully. But rarely in such helpful conditions has he felt like such a peripheral presence. Something here is missing, and as Australia forge ahead in this series England are running out of time to discover what it is.
Drilling down a little deeper into those three spells may just offer some clues. Of the 90 deliveries Anderson bowled on Wednesday, 30 of them were left alone – exactly a third. As a benchmark, Broad reckons that when he is bowling badly his leave percentage is around 30%, and he is a taller bowler who is easier to leave on length. On a day that demanded aggression, in a team that scorns the impulse to bowl for dots rather than wickets, Anderson finished with a sparkling economy rate but precious few chances.
Why this might be is a tougher question to answer. Perhaps it is a simple case of rust: Anderson’s preparation for the series was disrupted by injury, and at times you can sense him striving for that natural rhythm, the zip in the stride that turns good balls into great balls. But there was clearly also an element of intention here: a reluctance to offer up a driveable length, to find the swing that was so evidently on offer to his colleagues.
Graeme Swann likes to tell a story about Anderson’s stubbornness. Anderson was bowling a dreamy spell of outswingers against Sri Lanka when his captain Andrew Strauss suggested that he might like to try an inswinger. “Fuck off, Strauss,” Anderson replied, and promptly continued to bowl outswingers for another two overs. Perhaps the same part of Anderson that despises the “Clouderson” caricature also instinctively recoils against the idea of bowling conventional swing in a situation that clearly demands it. Who can be sure? All we can really say is that England need Anderson to unmute himself from this series as soon as possible.
• The subheading of this article was amended on 29 June 2023 to clarify that Jimmy Anderson bowled 15 overs but was wicketless, and Australia surged ahead.
