Weird Goodbyes
James Anderson said farewell, now he's back out there with a bowling mitt
I went to see The National for the umpteenth time last week. The band and particularly frontman Matt Berninger’s lyrics have been a touchstone for most of my adult life, long before I could relate to the tales of mid-life ennui, parental angst or existential despondency that swirl through their songs like drops of ink in a glass of water.
It’s a good bit of imagery that isn’t it? I’ve nabbed it from one of their songs (Green Gloves). When does paying homage become pilfering? As with plenty of other lyrics or bits of books or poems, I’ve worked The National infused phrases into stuff i’ve written over the years. Describing a batting line up as being obliterated like “bullets through rotten fruit” (Graceless) an exciting young player as “The new blue blood, the great white hope” (Mr November) or “Everything is gonna be totally OK into oblivion” (Oblivions) for Bazball, obviously.
I even quoted Berninger’s lyrics in my wedding speech, during the soppy bit too - “You know I dreamt about you, for 29 years, before I saw you” (Slow Show). I’ve lived most of my life in this way, (‘In a bloody dreamworld’ as my old man might say. As it happens, just yesterday he was teasing me on the phone about something ridiculously idealistic I’d brazenly chirruped to him as a sixteen year old - let it go Pa - it was twenty years ago!) with certain lines or phrases once read popping up to run like ticker tape underneath some everyday scenario.
“Memorise the bathwater, memorise the air
There'll come a time I'll want to know I was here
Names on the doorframes, inches and ages
Handprints in concrete, at the softest stages”
Most days during my daughter’s bath time I think of the above lines, tapping as they do into a particular kind of parental melancholy but also the more universal sense of time slipping by, sometimes unappreciated, and of trying to live in the moment.
The title of that song popped into my head last week at Lord’s. It’s called ‘Weird Goodbyes’. It was wasn’t it? There was a sort of awkward pageantry about Jimmy Anderson’s final Test, a prolonged farewell in a one-sided contest that you sensed the man himself was at odds with.
Jon has written on these pages that Anderson - whilst undoubtedly one of the greats of the game - doesn’t really do it for him. Being a contrary so-and-so I then wrote something to counter Jon’s piece, but then found myself at Lord’s last week feeling distinctly unmoved.
Perhaps it was the lack of a contest or the staged and signposted feeling to the whole thing? Perhaps it was the lengthy video montages? Maybe it’s because the pomp and ceremony of Lord’s leaves me cold at the best of times and queasy at others - maybe that’s down to the avalanche of chinos and miasma of Veuve Clicquot. Maybe, possibly, it could be the chip on my shoulder.
Anderson seemed determined not to cry, he stated this himself in interviews before the game. They make them tough in Burnley. Nevertheless, speaking to Nasser Hussain after the match with a pint of Guinness in hand, Anderson’s voice wobbled with emotion when he paid thanks to his family.
“It’s about your family too, they’ve been an incredible support and I’m so grateful for what they’ve done and that they had the chance to be a part of this.”
The one time it looked like Anderson’s tear ducts might betray him came when his daughters rang the bell at the start of day one. It reminded me of a lyric of Berninger’s about what it is like to be away on tour, separate from a young family, the realisation that time has passed irrevocably when you return.
“Put your heels against the wall
I swear you got a little bit taller since I saw you”
And yet, as I type this Anderson is on the outfield at Trent Bridge with a bag of balls and a bowling mitt. Bowling is in his blood. In his DNA. His double helix a quarter seam. Some cricketers retire and can’t bring themselves to pick up a bat or a ball again. Not Jimmy. A quote of his from a few years back that was included in his final match programme says it all:
“I’ll still bowl after I retire, without question. Even into a baseball mitt at the other end of the wicket. Just to see the ball do what I can make it do.”
I was asked to write something about Anderson for the same programme. (Thanks again, John S) I wanted to try and tap into this feeling, that bowling for Anderson is an elemental thing, the sacrifices, accolades, numerical records and milestones are all secondary to the act itself.
Posted below is what initially came out, sparked by some other more well known but no less pilfered lyrics. ‘In a bloody dreamworld again…’
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“And in the end, the love you take, is equal to the... wickets you take?”
Or should that be ‘records you break?’ What about ‘statisticians you slake’? ‘Batter’s you’ve kept awake’? ‘Cricket balls you’ve made snake’? ‘Spectators and commentators who can no longer ‘speyk’?
The Beatles recorded their musical epitaph as a four piece just half a mile up the road from where you are sitting. Paul McCartney plucking a suitably cosmic couplet out of the night sky in 1969 - almost 55 years ago to the day you are reading this.
It did the job, of sorts, but really – how do you put a cap on something so intangible? It’s an impossible task. A bit like being asked to write a few hundred words on England’s greatest ever seam bowler to go in his final Test programme. Good luck with that, son.
Endings are hard. Goodbyes even more so. How to find the right words, tap into the right sentiment? James Anderson’s Test career has been such a long journey that people have been asking him about retirement for the past decade. His wickets have run through so many summers, his bowling bookmarked so many lives.
Focus on his longevity, that might get the point across? Anderson’s Test career pre-dates the invention of the Iphone, YouTube and Facebook. Daniel Craig’s Bond, David Tennant’s Doctor Who, Taylor Swift’s global domination, 4G…5G, he’s seen off the global financial crisis, the Brexit referendum, Donald Trump’s Presidency (for now…) the Coronavirus pandemic, The Crazy Frog, Baby Shark, Baby Reindeer, The (large) Hadron Collider – you guys have taken one hell of a Jimmy-ing!
More?
James Anderson’s Test career has spanned two decades. He’s bowled 39,877 balls and taken 700 wickets. “If you had a 9-5 job watching every ball Anderson has bowled in Tests for England…” explains Test Match Special’s Stats supremo Andy Zaltzman, “…five days a week, hour off for lunch - you’d be working 12 weeks and 3 days, assuming you don’t take any days off, no bank holidays, no sickies…”
Zaltzman is the best at making the numbers resonate. How about this one: “Anderson’s 6646.1 overs are the equivalent to bowling every over from both ends for 68 days, almost 14 complete Test matches - that’s not factoring in rain, or bad light” Or Bilal Shafayat ambling on with some spare gloves…
Over the next few pages you’ll read numbers that’ll make the cortex boggle, but in truth the statistics don’t tell the whole James Anderson story – they are the moss that has gathered on a rolling stone. To try and sum him up in numbers alone would be to miss point, like explaining the Beatles in terms of how many Top Ten hits they had. Like the Fab Four, England’s ‘Greatest One’ tapped into something deeper and stands for something more.
It’s been said before but bears repeating - we’ll never see his like again. The game has moved on, Anderson is about to and so, in time, will we.
And this is it. The time has come. As David Brown, Anderson’s childhood friend ever since those early days at Burnley Cricket Club recently told me. “You just automatically think: ‘Oh yeah, Jim will be playing in the Test match.’ Now it’s just hitting us all: ‘Oh, actually, this will be the last time.’”
To truly appreciate James Anderson all you have to do to is watch what he can make a cricket ball do. The thing he’s spent almost his entire life honing and perfecting. To truly appreciate James Anderson all you have to do is see him bowl. Look, there he is at the top of his mark.
For one last time then.
Goodbye Jimmy. Thanks for the memories.
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