It seems Stuart Broad and Jimmy Anderson aren’t finished yet. After splitting four wickets for 34 runs between them against West Indies, Broad promised the pair had at least four more years to come.
“Jimmy seems to want to keep going till he’s Darren Stevens’ age, he seems to want to keep trundling in till he’s 42,” Broad said. “Both of us have got a burning desire to keep going and keep winning Test matches for England.
“I certainly get the feeling that when one of us goes, the other will be one of the first to know, and there’s no talk of that yet. Jimmy’s getting better and better and so am I, so we’ll keep striking while the iron is hot.”
Broad conceded that they had not played together a lot lately, “but we slotted back into what we do and how we work together to take wickets. We pride ourselves on building pressure and adapting to conditions quicker than the opening batsmen do, and we did exactly that today.”
In fact, he added, the whole attack had, and he picked out Chris Woakes for praise: “He is in the best rhythm of his life.” It certainly felt like England’s strongest bowling unit, and when Broad asked if everyone thought “on today’s performance we’re in the best bowling attack?” the smile on his face suggested it was a rhetorical question.
The next thing to do, Broad said, is to “bowl the West Indies out so we have the option of a follow-on”. He isn’t sure if England would take it but added: “If we could get those five wickets quickly in the first hour and a half we’d still have four relative fresh seamers and Dom Bess to come into the game, so it would be an interesting decision.”
It was Broad’s batting that put them in the position to do it. His 62 from 45 balls carried the game away from the West Indies just as they were threatening to come back into it.
He was pretty modest about the innings, saying he had played like “a headless chicken”, but there was a little more thought to it than that. He has been working hard with Peter Moores. The two had come up with a plan to model Broad’s game on Shane Warne’s.
“[Warne] would hit balls in different areas, and was pretty effective, especially in the 2005 Ashes,” said Broad. “So it was about trying to change the momentum of the innings and hit the bowlers off their lengths. So there was a little bit of thought process to the madness.”
