Jimmy: My Story

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James Anderson was born in Burnley in 1982 and played for Burnley CC before making his first-class debut for Lancashire in 2002. The following winter he made his England debut in Australia. Since then, he has gone on to play 77 Tests for England before the tour of New Zealand in 2012–13, taking almost 300 Test wickets, helping the side to two Ashes series wins. He has also played more than 160 one-day internationals, and he is now England’s all-time leading international wicket-taker, having overhauled Sir Ian Botham’s record of 528. He was named one of Wisden ’s Five Cricketers of the Year in 2009 and was England Player of the Year in 2012.

Richard Gibson , who worked with James Anderson on the writing of this book, is a freelance journalist and regular contributor to several national newspapers. His previous collaborations include David Lloyd’s bestselling Start the Car: The World According to Bumble and Graeme Swann’s The Breaks Are Off .

First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2012

This paperback edition published by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2013

A CBS COMPANY

Copyright © 2012, 2013 by James Anderson

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

No reproduction without permission.

All rights reserved.

The right of James Anderson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

Simon & Schuster UK Ltd

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Simon & Schuster Australia, Sydney

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The publishers acknowledge the trademarks of Cricket Australia in these pages and where used note that they have been reproduced with the approval of Cricket Australia

Every reasonable effort has been made to contact copyright holders of material reproduced in this book. If any have inadvertently been overlooked, the publishers would be glad to hear from them and make good in future editions any errors or omissions brought to their attention.

A CIP catalogue for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-0-85720-707-4

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-47112-831-8

Typeset by M Rules

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

In memory of my grandparents – Bob, Doreen, Danny and Mary.

I owe you so much.

Not only were you a huge support to me, you proved amazing role models who taught me that there is nothing more important in this life than family. If I can keep my own family as close-knit, I will be a very happy man.

Contents

1 Grumpy

2 Roots

3 Red Rose Blooming

4 England Calling

5 Rise and Fall

6 Behind Every Good Man . . .

7 Fighting Back

8 A Sobering Winter

9 Resurrection

10 Testing Times

11 A New Dawn

12 Ashes Regained

13 Plotting a Route to the Top

14 The Highest of Highs to the Lowest of Lows

15 Two Dozen Reasons to be Happy

16 Top of the World

17 Surplus to Requirements

18 The Changing of the Guard

Acknowledgements

Index

List of Illustrations

1

Grumpy

One of life’s preconceptions is that fast bowlers are all made from exactly the same stock: leaders of men, ultra-confident, with rippling muscles, rhino-hide skin and superhero strength. The alpha males of the cricketing jungle, the cocks of the walk; some have been rumoured to be partial to slabs of raw meat.

Traditionally they’ve been bred tough, as labourers in coal mines or on building sites. From an English perspective, you will know the kind of characters I’m talking about here: Harold Larwood, the godfather of the art, and Fred Trueman, a man whose clan reveres him as the best fast bowler Yorkshire has ever produced (which therefore also made him the best in the world, of course) and who spent every waking hour living up to his nickname, Fiery Fred. Darren Gough and Andrew Flintoff are their modern equivalents.

Well, I’d better make the confession now. This fast bowler’s wired up differently. Living proof that not all fast bowlers are chiselled from granite, possess the necessary physical prowess to wrestle polar bears to the death or the personality traits of what folk might call a man’s man. Call me a bespoke model, if you like, but those archetypal characteristics passed me by. To be fair, it’s hard to make aggression look convincing when you’ve spent your adolescence aiming to avoid it as the class short-arse. You see, until a ludicrous growth spurt at the age of fifteen, I stood about 5 ft tall, and, unlike my predecessors, I’ve never had to worry about whether my bum looked big in whites.

There was no pull-yourself-up-from-your-bootstraps start for me either, coming from a well-to-do, middle-class family from Brierfield, just outside the Lancashire town of Burnley. My dad’s lighting equipment was not strapped to a helmet. I am the son of an optician, not a miner.

Some people are almost born to be fast bowlers because of the size and shape they are blessed with. But it was not until the fifth form at school that it appeared likely that I would make Burnley’s first team let alone England’s. Of course, I’d never stopped dreaming, much the same as other cricket-mad lads – I always thought ‘James Anderson, international cricketer’ had a nice ring to it, and I regularly pretended to be an England player when I was battling against my mates David Brown and Gareth Halley on my mum and dad’s drive.

Now if you’re interested enough about me to be reading this, you either like your sportsmen to be dour or you believe there’s more to me than you see on the field. Because, let’s face it, there’s not much getting away from the fact that I do a rather fine line in grumpy whenever I cross the white line. You see, I am fully aware that the general public’s impression of me is that I am quite a cantankerous sod. Granted, it’s hardly without foundation. Unfortunately, that is my game face; my work clothes; my uniform. In case this one passed you by, in addition to being the modern equivalent of cavemen, fast bowlers are GRUMPY SO AND SOs. We spend half our working lives with our feet up, and, let’s be honest, when that is one half of your job description, you ain’t going to be wearing a permanent smile across your clock when the other half is spent in sweltering heat a couple of hours after your batsmen have been dismissed for jack.

However, despite the gurning looks and less than complimentary words I offer towards the blokes standing with wooden weapons in their hands who step into my office, I can confirm two things in these initial pages. Firstly, I thoroughly enjoy what I do. Love it, in fact.