![James Anderson of England bowls during day three of the LV=Insurance Ashes 4th Test Match between England and Australia at Emirates Old Trafford on July 20, 2023 in Manchester, England](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/cricket/2024/07/08/TELEMMGLPICT000343452269_17204443184500_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bq40-CmOK01vgVlyEsdpBst-DoEVIfeMytlEVIUatPK3E.jpeg?imwidth=680)
Six balls that prove James Anderson is greatest seamer of all time
When it comes skills, few, if any, can match the deep repertoire of Anderson – and he’s got the highlights and numbers to prove it
![James Anderson of England bowls during day three of the LV=Insurance Ashes 4th Test Match between England and Australia at Emirates Old Trafford on July 20, 2023 in Manchester, England](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/cricket/2024/07/08/TELEMMGLPICT000343452269_17204443184500_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bq40-CmOK01vgVlyEsdpBst-DoEVIfeMytlEVIUatPK3E.jpeg?imwidth=680)
James Anderson will play his final Test match for England this week after a remarkable career that has seen him take more wickets than any other seamer.
Telegraph Sport breaks down the six balls that show why Anderson became the greatest.
Trademark outswinger
Trent Bridge, 2008: Brendon McCullum b Anderson 9
Bowling daringly full, swinging the ball late at high pace and then uprooting the off stump: this is the essence of early James Anderson. Brendon McCullum - what became of him? - shaped to hit to the on side, anticipating that the ball would carry on at the same line. He was wrong. Instead, the delivery curved late, and flattened the off stump.
It was an embodiment of early Anderson: both his natural gifts, and his unstintingly attacking instincts. These traits earned Anderson a Test debut aged 20. They also explained why Anderson’s first 20 Tests were spread over five years, during which he conceded 3.7 an over.
Along the way, Anderson was told that his action would lead to injury. On the England and Wales Cricket Board’s advice, who claimed a new action could increase his speed to 95mph, he tweaked his action and then became injured anyway. By 2008, when he was finally trusted to be a Test regular, Anderson had returned to the natural action he had used since he was eight, which culminates in his head falling away as he releases the ball. A little unorthodox, yes, but also smooth and rhythmical.
![New Zealand batsman Brendon McCullum is bowled for 9 runs during day two of the 3rd npower Test Match between England and New Zealand at Trent Bridge, on June 6 2008, in Nottingham, England](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/cricket/2024/07/08/TELEMMGLPICT000002530104_17204418732620_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqY0XMnE4berkpvWhc-fw2CCqhhN_cpmLU5aSU4P3rJlg.jpeg?imwidth=350)
In some ways it is a shame that Anderson’s Test career is not lasting one more week: the swing-friendly conditions at Trent Bridge have often witnessed him at his most thrilling, as McCullum could attest. Since his emergence, Anderson’s command of outswing has never been in doubt. To become a record-breaker, he had to learn to thrive in all climes.
Thriving in the battle
Perth, 2010: Ryan Harris b Anderson 3
Stuart Broad, for 15 years Anderson’s opening partner, always brought a sense of theatre to the field - whether geeing up the crowd or, to bring about a change of luck, even switching the bails. Anderson was far less demonstrative: content to be a sportsman, not a showman.
Yet Anderson’s low-key nature on the pitch, and his tendency for surliness, should not obscure his spikiness or his insatiable competitiveness. “He could be quite abrasive,” Australia opener Chris Rogers told me of facing Anderson. “My plan was to ignore him when he spoke.”
![James Anderson of England and David Warner of Australia have words during day four of the First Test Match of the 2017/18 Ashes Series between Australia and England at The Gabba on November 26, 2017 in Brisbane, Australia](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/cricket/2024/07/08/TELEMMGLPICT000147673134_17204420913590_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqFM8JNviqypEqpEVTJZDkiRa306WnPHVE_UdBq2uCdwc.jpeg?imwidth=350)
Not all Australians took the same approach. Late on day one of the third Ashes Test in 2010/11 at Perth, as Anderson prepared to bowl, he was met by Mitchell Johnson, at the non-striker’s end. Johnson asked Anderson, “Why are you chirping now mate, not getting any wickets?”
Seconds later, after making a wreckage of Harris’ stumps, Anderson turned to Johnson and stared back at him. This time, Johnson had no words in response. Engulfed by his team-mates, Anderson then put his index finger to his mouth, beseeching Johnson to be quiet. This was a wicket notable less for the delivery - though this was a fine yorker that clean bowled Ryan Harris - than what it revealed about Anderson’s character.
Though England lost the Test, the moment became one of the emblems of the tour. Anderson’s 24 wickets, showing off his greater control and ‘wobble seam’, a delivery that could seam in either direction after pitching which he learned in 2010, underpinned England’s 3-1 win.
Learned inswinger
St George’s, 2015: Kraigg Brathwaite b Anderson 1
When the ball is swinging, Anderson’s outswinger is his signature. So it was on the first morning in Grenada in 2015, when Anderson greeted Kraigg Brathwaite with a series of outswingers, including one edged just short of second slip.
Now, Brathwaite was primed for more. Anderson, of course, knew as much. And so he flipped the direction of his swing subtly, now tilting the angle of the seam slightly towards fine leg, rather than the slips; he pitched the ball up to maximise swing.
![England's James Anderson celebrates the wicket of West Indies' Kraigg Brathwaite and his 500th test wicket](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/cricket/2024/07/08/TELEMMGLPICT000139734718_17204426239900_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqpVlberWd9EgFPZtcLiMQf0Rf_Wk3V23H2268P_XkPxc.jpeg?imwidth=350)
Brathwaite had expected to be defending a ball just outside his off stump. Instead, in the final third of his path, the delivery hooped back from outside off stump: it bisected the gate between bat and pad, and crashed into the bottom of middle stump.
“Probably the best inswinger I have ever bowled,” Anderson later wrote. “That was the perfect dismissal.”
![tmg.video.placeholder.alt 96iZcqmcEAo](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/96iZcqmcEAo/mqdefault.jpg)
All the more perfect for being the culmination of years of toil. While he was always able to generate lavish outswing for England, it took Anderson five years into his international career to feel comfortable bowling inswing. Another seven years later, Anderson bowled the consummate inswinger: a product both of his skills and his shrewdness in how to use them.
Reverse swing maestro
Chennai, 2021: Ajinkya Rahane b Anderson 0
During Anderson’s early years as a Test cricketer, he was sometimes derided as ‘Clouderson’, implying that he needed help from the conditions to be effective. The worst thing about the claim was that it contained a kernel of truth; in his first six years away from home, a period spanning 15 Tests, Anderson averaged 48.1 overseas.
But, in the years ahead, perhaps nowhere was Anderson more admirable than in Asia. There, he showcased his full array of cutters, reverse swing and sheer creativity – often bowling straighter than in England, to keep the stumps in play, and sometimes spearing bouncers awkwardly into batsmen’s ribs. Anderson also accepted a more defensive role, often pulling his length back; his economy rate in Asia was 0.2 runs less than in England.
![James Anderson of England bowls during a nets session at Himachal Pradesh Cricket Association Stadium on March 05, 2024 in Dharamsala, India](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/cricket/2024/07/08/TELEMMGLPICT000369310400_17204430833620_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqmRnaWIkzDVpCKltYOKrpmbCWyGSnnBBceXn9_z2HCsA.jpeg?imwidth=350)
In India in 2012, in a series dominated by spin, Anderson’s 12 wickets were, to India’s captain MS Dhoni, “The difference between the bowling sides”. England’s achievement in winning 2-1 has only become more remarkable: India have since won their next 17 series at home.
Yet Anderson’s apotheosis in Asia came in 2021. An hour into the final day of the opening Test at Chennai, with India two wickets down and battling to save the match, Anderson was summoned back into the attack, in quest of reverse swing.
He found it immediately. Recognising as much, he pitched his second delivery of the over up even more, and sent Shubman Gill’s off stump on a cartwheel.
Ajinkya Rahane almost succumbed to his second ball. England’s review for lbw showed that the ball was hitting his middle stump; the batsman was saved because the point of impact was umpire’s call. No matter. Next delivery, Anderson went wider of the crease, creating a more extreme angle for the delivery to move back. The ball missed both Rahane’s bat and his pad before thudding into off stump.
A double wicket maiden with the old ball in India: the over distilled Anderson’s hard-won mastery of the most onerous conditions. His final tally of 92 wickets in Asia, at an average of 27.5, is a joint-record for any overseas quick there, shared with Dale Steyn.
Wobble seam and swing innovator
Trent Bridge, 2021: Virat Kohli c Buttler b Anderson 0
Of all Anderson’s head-to-head rivalries, none has been more compelling than his duel with Virat Kohli. In 2014, his first series in England, Anderson dismissed Kohli four times in 50 balls; he averaged a meagre 13.4.
It was the cue for Kohli to remodel his entire approach to batting in England. In 2018, Kohli returned with a new method: pointing his toe at point, rather than cover, and meeting the ball an average of half a metre further forward to negate movement. This time, he averaged 59.30; Anderson still challenged Kohli constantly, yet didn’t take a wicket in 270 balls to him.
![Virat Kohli reacts to England's James Anderson](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/cricket/2024/07/08/TELEMMGLPICT000268155092_17204433568380_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqtMutwwx9W-AXpU26IHGqxZgojZYlP8f0i9h2tPqCNsM.jpeg?imwidth=350)
When Kohli returned to England for his third tour in 2021, it had been seven years since Anderson dismissed him in Test cricket. Seven years of waiting, ended in one ball.
Consider what Kohli encountered as he walked out at Trent Bridge. First, there was inswing, a threat that Kohli moved to cover. But after swinging in, the ball then seamed away: a feat of confounding geometry, like a magician’s sleight of hand. Kohli stood motionless, disbelieving.
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How did Anderson do it? Essentially, he combined two of his most venomous attributes - swing and seam - in one ball. While using his wrist position to swing the ball in, Anderson also used a wider grip, designed to generate wobble seam, which wobbles in the air before catching the pitch and then moving in either direction. Over his career, Anderson increasingly came to embrace wobble seam. The reason is basic physics: a batsman has less time to react to a ball that moves off the seam than one that only swings in the air before pitching.
“My thinking there is, I’m using the wobble seam grip so it might nip either way off the pitch,” Anderson later explained. “It’s just trying to make them play basically.”
For most quick bowlers, the essential trade-off is between hunting swing and seam. Anderson became immune from this essential limitation.
Thinking outside the box and stamina
Rawalpindi, 2022: Mohammad Rizwan caught Stokes b Anderson 29
Anderson has bowled 39,877 balls in Test cricket, 6,000 more than any other seamer. Debilitating pain in his left shoulder is the price of this durability. Getting up 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.
When Anderson’s greatest feats are shown in the days ahead, they are unlikely to feature Mohammad Rizwan caught at short midwicket, reducing Pakistan to 475-6. And yet few wickets better explain why Anderson has enjoyed a record-breaking 21-year Test career.
The most remarkable part of this wicket was that Anderson was there to take it at all. After 175 Tests, he would have been entitled not to relish a tour of Pakistan, notorious for its flat pitches. In the opening Test, with England battling an outbreak of food poisoning that almost led to the game being postponed, Rawalpindi took batsmen’s advantages to extremes. England thrashed 657 in their first innings, then took 65 overs to prize out a single Pakistan wicket.
It was the cue for Anderson to summon all his ingenuity. Late on day three, Anderson switched to around the wicket against right-handers, normally an angle used by quicks who are bowling bouncers. But Anderson used it in a more unusual way: to target the stumps, and induce batsmen into playing to a packed leg side. This was how he accounted for Rizwan. A little early on the ball, Rizwan flicked to Ben Stokes at short midwicket, who completed the plan that he had helped to initiate.
Yet the greatest credit belonged to Anderson: for adapting his customary tactics so drastically, and then having the skill and stamina to convert the thinking into a wicket.
His deferred gratification came on the final day. Once again bowling unconventionally, including using his awkward bouncer to great effect, Anderson took four wickets in the second innings, hurrying England to victory in fading light. Given the circumstances, his match haul of 5-88 from 46 overs ranks among his finest performances; Anderson rated it his best win away from home. Two months later, Anderson returned to being ranked as the world’s number one Test bowler, the oldest man to hold the title since 1936.
Anderson often creates the illusion that fast bowling is easy. Mostly, though, it is an act of unforgiving toil. Aged 40, on a pitch that was the antithesis of those that he had grown up on in Burnley, Anderson helped to author one of England’s most unlikely triumphs. It encapsulated the qualities that have sustained Anderson: eternal curiosity about his art, resourcefulness and sheer bloodymindedness.
The ‘home truths’ that set Anderson on path for greatness
In the end is our beginning. When James Anderson played his first game of this season for Lancashire, to warm up for his farewell Test against West Indies at Lord’s, his coach was the same person who set Anderson on the right path when he was a teenager playing for Burnley one quarter of a century ago.
Dale Benkenstein, now Lancashire’s coach, was Burnley’s professional back in 1997, when he saw Anderson for the first time, and again when he returned there in 2001. That summer Benkenstein invited the lad who had just turned 18 to his one-bedroom flat in Burnley to tell him about the realities of professional cricket. Born in Zimbabwe and schooled in South Africa, for whom he played 23 one-day internationals, Benkenstein went on from being Burnley’s pro to captain Durham to their first trophy.
The teenaged Anderson had played a few games for Lancashire Second XI as a promising pace bowler, but his county coaches were not altogether happy. He was a mettlesome colt - anything less and he would never have become the all-time master of English swing-and-seam bowling - and strong-willed.
“Even from the first time I saw him when he was 14, the way he ran in, he looked like a 400-metre runner,” Benkenstein vividly remembers. “He wasn’t very tall when I first saw him, but when I came back four years later everything was falling into place. He was very competitive and such an amazing athlete, with this natural ability to bowl fast.
“I’d never seen such a natural action, and he had a fantastic wrist. His stock ball was this beautiful outswinger, and when he got it wrong, he bowled an inswinger which at that level knocked over the tail. But when things didn’t work out perfectly and he had a bad day, which was inevitable, he couldn’t understand why, and that really did frustrate him. The Lancashire coaches wanted to give him the tools to fix it.” So Anderson was ever the perfectionist.
“We also had a few good partnerships batting together, which was fun,” Benkenstein said. “My involvement with the club was five days a week, coaching from Under-11s upwards, and the captain could play in the same game at Under-18 level as long as he batted number eleven and just held up his end. I actually thought when I was coaching him he was going to be a genuine all-rounder. It hasn’t quite worked out that way - but he has scored more Test runs than me!”
When Anderson was invited, or summoned, to Benkenstein’s flat in Burnley, the gist was that he had to modify, a bit, that stubborn streak.
“I had to give him some home truths,” Benkenstein explained. “He was a normal teenager, strong-minded, and I wanted to make sure he had an insight into what was involved in being a professional cricketer. It was not a question of bowling one or two balls perfectly, it was about doing it over and over again, bowling day-in day-out with a repeatable action.”
At the Burnley club Anderson was lucky in having not only a good coach but the right sort of team-mates and peer pressure, according to Benkenstein. “During my stint there were a lot of people who gave him a stable base. David and Michael Brown both went on to play first-class cricket, and so did John Clare, while Peter Brown was the chairman who got Burnley back on its feet. They are still running the club well, these unsung people behind the scenes.”
Benkenstein, in his flat, came to the point. “Somewhere along the line I asked him, what else are you going to do in life?” And 23 years later, after Anderson has played more Test matches (187) than anybody except Sachin Tendulkar, and taken 700 wickets (exceeded by Muttiah Muralitharan and Shane Warne alone), he is back to the dilemma of his beginning.
For the rest of this summer he is going to be the pace bowlers’ mentor in the England dressing-room, but there is more to the job than ironing out technical issues. The most successful England bowling coach, in that he helped win the 2005 Ashes, was the Tasmanian Troy Cooley. He knew his stuff about reverse-swing but essentially he acted like a big brother to Steve Harmison, Matthew Hoggard, Andrew Flintoff and Simon Jones, jollying them along on the morning of a match.
Jollying people along might involve another stage in the growth of Anderson’s personality, or else it might come naturally once he is free of the physical pain inherent in bowling quick. Alternatively, after this summer and his uniquely successful career, it could pan out to be his turn to invite Benkenstein for a chat about Lancashire’s coaches.