Most pace bowlers retire in their early thirties, so why is James Anderson in the form of his life? As he prepares to contest the Ashes for the tenth time, he tells our science editor, Ben Spencer, the secret of his longevity.
On the penultimate day of the Ashes next month, Jimmy Anderson, the most prolific fast bowler of all time, turns 41. It is an incredible age for any elite athlete, putting the Englishman among a pantheon of international sportsmen who in recent years have forced us to reassess our idea of an ageing body’s limits. Roger Federer won his 20th grand-slam singles title at 36; Tom Brady won a seventh Super Bowl at 43; Johan Clarey won an alpine skiing silver medal in Beijing at the record age of 41. But Anderson’s specialism takes a particularly hard toll on the body.
“Fast bowling is a young man’s pursuit,” according to the England bowler Frank “Typhoon” Tyson, who was one of the fastest of his time. Tyson, who died at the age of 85 in 2015, retired from his injuries at the age of 30. These days, on average, fast bowlers still retire in their early thirties. They suffer for their craft — mastering the straight-armed, torso-twisting contortions that Tyson once described as “the most unnatural physical action you’ll ever see in your life”. Andrew Flintoff, hero of the 2005 Ashes, retired from international cricket at 31. Jofra Archer, another talented English seamer, is out injured yet again at 28. “Fast bowling is brutal, there’s no two ways about it,” says Rob Ahmun, head of performance science and medicine at the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB).
Yet Anderson has not only defied the laws of ageing — he has reversed them: in middle age he is improving. Over the ten Test matches he has played in the past year he has conceded just 17.62 runs for each wicket taken, compared with an average of 26.58 in the preceding 19 years. He is bowling better than he ever has. In February, after taking seven wickets in a match against New Zealand, he rose to the top of the International Cricket Council (ICC) Test rankings, becoming the world’s No 1 bowler for the sixth time in his career, and the oldest to do so since 1936. (The Indian spinner Ravichandran Ashwin, 36, has since crept past him to the top spot.)
As the cricket commentator Jonathan Agnew once put it, Anderson is “an anomaly amongst pacemen, a strange, brilliant glitch in the biomechanics machine [who] has kept going when the purring engines of even the greatest of his peers have long since puttered out”.
He is by far the most successful English bowler ever to have picked up a ball, with 685 Test wickets to his name. He has played 179 Test matches, second only to the Indian batsman Sachin Tendulkar. And on Friday, all being well, he will chalk up another record when he lines up for England against Australia at Edgbaston. This will be his tenth Ashes series, a figure no player has surpassed in the postwar era.
“Really?” Anderson says when I tell him this. “I wouldn’t know. I suppose so — it wouldn’t surprise me.” He seems oddly uninterested in statistics. His only focus is on what he does with the first ball of the series. “It’s really important to get the first blow in at Edgbaston,” he says.
So how does he continue to do it? How does a middle-aged father of two not only stay at the top of his game but keep getting better?
We meet at Old Trafford, the home of Lancashire Cricket Club, where Anderson has played since he was a teenager — and where one section of the ground is named the James Anderson End in his honour.
Relaxed in his England tracksuit, the slightest hint of grey in his stubble, he puts his continued success down to a hunger to win. Twenty years after he arrived at Lord’s to play his first Test against Zimbabwe, the tips of his dark hair frosted blond, his ruthless streak remains undimmed.
“The competitive nature isn’t something I have ever had to work on,” he says. “When I was a kid, whether it was cricket or football or whatever, I wanted to win. It’s the other stuff I need to work on — from fitness to skills to the mental side of the game.”
To understand why fast bowling is so gruelling, you only have to examine what Anderson does when he delivers the ball. He starts 15 paces back from the crease. “Everyone else uses a tape measure but I’m old-school,” he says. “I just walk it out.” When he is satisfied that everyone in the field is in their right place, he starts his run-up — tentatively at first, slowly, bent forward so his back is almost parallel to the ground, then gradually straightening up, picking up speed until he is at full tilt, sprinting at 25km/h. Just before the crease he turns sideways as he leaps into the air, rotating his back and twisting his shoulders, his entire body cocked and loaded. Then he crashes down, 600kg of force — seven times his bodyweight — shooting up through his front leg. The body’s natural instinct when throwing is to bend the elbow. But the laws of cricket say he must keep his arm straight. So he pivots forward and down, his head dipping almost to his knee with the effort as his arm shoots over, firing the ball at 85mph towards the unfortunate batsman.
Once in every 50 balls he will claim a wicket. The other 49 times a fielder throws him the ball and he walks back to do it all again. He will expect to bowl up to 40 overs — 240 balls — during a five-day Test match. And then, a few days later, he will play another Test — up to five times in just over seven weeks. In all forms of the game he has repeated this action 48,299 times in competitive matches for England over the past 20 years.
Part of the secret of his longevity can be traced back to his childhood. He developed his fluid bowling style as an eight-year-old, and by the time he had begun to make a name for himself at Lancashire aged 19 he was bowling at 90mph. England, however, wanted him to go even faster — the sport being obsessed with raw pace at that time. “They thought they could get me to 95mph,” Anderson says. After his 2003 Test debut, in which he took five wickets, the coaches tinkered with his style. He lost his rhythm, had some terrible spells and was dropped. Desperate to force his way back into the squad, he persevered and in 2006 ended up with a stress fracture in his spine. It was then that the Lancashire coach Mike Watkinson showed Kevin Shine — England’s bowling coach at the time — footage of Anderson bowling as a 15-year-old. “It looked incredibly natural,” Shine later said, and suggested to Anderson that he go back to his old technique. “You could see the relief in his face.”
Since then Anderson has suffered no issues with his back. The old action “is basically what I’ve still got now”, he says. “I bowled it for years and years and your body gets used to it. So when you try to change that it can have an adverse effect and put more stress on it.”
Anderson believes his story demonstrates the limits of an overly technical approach. “I think that’s the flip side of the scientific stuff. Obviously you want to help players and prevent injuries. But there’s a danger of just tinkering for the sake of it.”
Just over a year ago he was left out of a series against the West Indies along with his bowling partner Stuart Broad. But then came a change of regime, with the New Zealander Brendon “Baz” McCullum taking over as head coach and introducing a more attacking style of play derived from one-day cricket, dubbed “Bazball”, which has returned Anderson and Broad to the fray.
Anderson has had to accept, though, that he is unlikely to play every Ashes match. “Given the intensity that we play with now, you need to be as close to 100 per cent fit as possible. If you ask all the bowlers, they’d say it will be difficult for any bowler to get through five Tests.”
That seems more likely in light of a groin injury Anderson suffered when playing against Somerset last month. He had bowled beautifully in that match — taking two wickets for sixteen runs in fourteen overs — but when he walked off injured a nation of cricket lovers held its breath. “It wasn’t serious,” he insists. “It’s just a low-grade strain. So I’m back running now, bowling again in the nets. I don’t feel it’s something to worry about.”
In his 2019 biography he admitted that “I have rarely ever bowled pain free and, to state the obvious, it doesn’t get any easier the older you get. The challenge, once a bowler has found that natural ability, is whether their body can physically endure the demands in the long term or whether they have the discipline to do it regularly enough.”
Helping him is a huge team of coaches, physios, nutritionists and sports scientists, both at England and Lancashire. “I know that I can’t play unless I do stuff that might be conceived as boring, so I listen to the experts,” Anderson says. Their advice has changed dramatically over the years. “When I started, everyone just did the gym — batters and bowlers all did the same thing. But in the past ten, fifteen years it has developed not just to the specifics of bowlers, but specifics for each individual.”
Over the past two decades the ECB has worked closely with sports scientists at Loughborough University to calculate the precise nature of the strains experienced by each bowler in order to minimise the injury risk. “Technology has changed massively,” says Mark King, professor of sports biomechanics at Loughborough. “If we wanted to understand accurately what someone was doing 20 years ago, then we had to use 16mm cine film.”
Now they use high-tech motion analysis systems, pressure plates, GPS units and accelerometers to assess every part of a bowler’s action, the forces they have to cope with and the movements that might cause problems in the future.
Some fundamentals, though, never change. “Because of the nature of the demands on someone like Jimmy, we need him to be as efficient as possible,” the ECB’s Ahmun says. “He needs to have an aerobic capacity, and to be as lean as he possibly can be, so that he is robust and able to recover in between Tests. A good metric is whether he is still able to maintain ball speed right at the end of the day as in his first over. Consistency is really important.”
Over the course of a five-day Test match Anderson will run 50km, Ahmun says — significantly more than a marathon. About 7km of that movement is at speeds of more than 20km/h, and 3km at more than 25km/h. “To put that into perspective, a treadmill only goes up to 20km an hour.”
Running and strength work forms the core of Anderson’s training programme. “The volume of muscle mass that you’ve got starts declining after about the age of 30 to 35,” Ahmun says. “So we do a lot of work on that, to help keep the foundation there for him to keep using his skills.”
The man tasked with designing Anderson’s training programme is the strength and conditioning coach Phil Scott. A typical week will start with a gym session working on his calves.
“We know that older athletes have a higher susceptibility to calf strains due to changes in the muscle,” Scott says. “We use isometrics a lot.” These are exercises for which muscle groups are engaged to hold the body in a set position for a period of time without moving the joints or lengthening or shortening the muscles. “We target those areas where we know Jimmy has had previous history. We also do lots of what we call active mobility, it’s like our version of yoga. Then we’ll do a sprint session, which helps produce the speeds that he needs, but it also protects him — if you don’t sprint very often and then suddenly you’re asked to, your hamstrings are going to be under a lot of tension.” Recent developments include borrowing drills from track athletes to improve his sprinting.
Anderson does two or three aerobic sessions a week, but this is not just a case of going for a jog on the roads around his Cheshire home. “You have to take your heart rate to at least 90 per cent of its max,” Scott says. “I’d get him to spend between five and ten minutes in that zone — you’re going to have to work hard, it’s not a nice session.” Once he has been at that level for the prescribed time he can stop. “I don’t need him running half an hour for the sake of it — everything is targeted and efficient.”
This is usually done around a cricket pitch — which is “fundamentally a nice big ready-made running track. We try to keep them running on grass, we don’t want to chop and change the surface.”
Gym sessions focus on the legs, core and upper body, including bench presses and pull-ups. “Within all of this we do a lot of mobility work to keep suppleness around the crazy positions he has to get into.”
During the pandemic Anderson posted videos on social media in which he used his daughters, Lola, 14, and Ruby, 12, instead of free weights for bench-press exercises. Usually, however, he trains in private. “He is a very modest man, a shy man,” Scott says. “He works his socks off but he does it without show. If I’m training with him and there’s a group there he will ask to do it somewhere else. All you see is the finished athlete — he’s not posting it on Instagram.”
The nutritionist Charlie Binns provides detailed meal advice — but Anderson, a keen cook, is left to decide exactly what he eats. “Jimmy expends a large amount of calories, and it’s important to replenish these at every given opportunity throughout the day,” Binns says.
For breakfast Anderson is asked to eat at least 25g of protein and 85g of carbohydrates. “That could be a large bowl of porridge with a banana and a drizzle of honey, accompanied by two slices of toast, two poached eggs and a fruit juice,” Binns says. When training or playing he tops this up throughout the day with energy drinks, gels, bars and bananas, with a target of 30-60g of carbs an hour. Lunch and dinner each contain another 85g. “I just tell the players half of their plate should be filled with carbohydrates,” Binns says.
Anderson, whose image adorns the back of buses as an ambassador for the vitamins brand Wellman, stresses that none of this is prescriptive. “We get the information given to us about what’s going to help us, but we don’t have someone sitting next to us saying, ‘You have to do this, you have to do that.’ We are left to make our own decisions.” And when the Ashes are over? “I’ll be ready for a fry-up and a Sunday roast — definitely.”
The same is true of drinking. English Test cricket was once infamous for its boozing culture. The 2005 Ashes-winning team’s tipsy trip to Downing Street and Flintoff’s drunken escapade in the Caribbean in 2007 — when emergency services had to rescue him from a pedalo — helped to cement that reputation. Sport in general and cricket in particular has become a lot more professionalised since then. “We’re grown men,” Anderson says. “You make your own decisions. Of course we can have a drink. It’s just picking the right time and not having loads.”
Long walks are encouraged on days when the players are not doing more active drills. “We’ve started to add in rehab time on feet,” Scott explains. “The players can spend 17 hours fielding over the course of a Test. It’s like me asking you to go for a six-and-a-half-hour dog walk, but every three minutes you do a twenty-metre sprint as hard as you can. You’d be knackered, wouldn’t you?”
Anderson likes to go on walks with his dog, a cavachon called Ginger. “Being out in the field with no distractions is quite nice,” he says. Golf, another of his passions, also serves this purpose. He started playing as a boy with his father, Michael, a keen member of Nelson Golf Club near Burnley. “It’s all miles in the legs. I tend to play with other cricketers from Lancs or England, and I’ve got mates back home in Burnley that I try to play with as much as I can.”
Seeing old friends also helps him cope with the mental pressures of the game — something many world-class cricketers, including Flintoff, Jonathan Trott and Kevin Pietersen — have spoken up about in recent years. Anderson has found it hard being away from his family when touring — he was in Sri Lanka when his wife, Daniella, suffered a miscarriage in 2007.
“There have been some low moments away,” he says. “Going on tour and not playing can be hard — especially if it’s a long stretch and you’ve got family at home. But my family has been amazing.”
His daughters play cricket but are not fanatical, he says, and Daniella, 46 — a model he met in a nightclub nearly 20 years ago — is happy not to discuss his job with him. “They’ve got a lack of interest in cricket, in a nice way. When I’m away from the game I become a dad and a husband and you kind of just get into everyday life: do the school run and cook dinner, play netball in the garden. That keeps me relaxed — not talking or thinking about cricket every minute of the day. And I’ve got a good group of friends as well. I try to get back to Burnley and see the football, do normal stuff that just keeps me happy.”
Despite his records he still refuses to consider himself among the greats of the game, pointing instead to the South African bowler Dale Steyn and Australia’s Glenn McGrath — “in my playing career the two best bowlers by a mile. They’re both comfortably better than me. I’ve just managed to be around for longer. I watch them and just wish I could do the stuff that they did.”
He has spent countless hours in the practice nets over the decades perfecting his stock “outswinging” delivery, which makes the ball swerve in midair away from a right-handed batsman. In matches he bowls his outswinger repeatedly — and then catches the batsman out with a sudden variation: reverse swingers, inswingers, off-cutters, leg-cutters, wobble seams and slower balls.
With a new ball Anderson achieves 1.5 degrees of swing. Others can make it swerve even more. The former England fast bowler Ryan Sidebottom managed more than 2 degrees. But Anderson’s trick is making it move very late, giving the batsman no time to see which way it is swinging. “I don’t think I ever learnt how to play him,” the former Australian batsman Michael Hussey complained after one Ashes series.
So how long can Anderson continue? At nearly 41, is he fearful his body will let him down?
“That’s been in my head for about six or seven years, thinking about the end. Maybe ever since I turned 30. As a fast bowler you know that there could be an injury around the corner that finishes you off. You could lose your pace. Your body could just not take the strains of it any more. So you’ve always got to be thinking about what’s next.”
And if he stays free of injury, he insists he could play until the next series against Australia in 2025, when he would be 43. “We’ve got about six months off after this series, so there’s a huge gap to be able to recover and get fit. There’s no reason I couldn’t get to the next Ashes.”
With the scientific know-how of his team, the carefully tailored training and nutrition package they put together for him, and two decades of conditioning behind him, why not?
Written by: Ben Spencer
© The Times of London
