James Anderson describes how he was forced to retire in Manchester hotel bar

James Anderson has detailed how the England management forcing him to retire from Test cricket in a Manchester hotel bar made him feel like he was in the movie Goodfellas.

In April this year, England coach Brendon McCullum travelled from New Zealand to join managing director Rob Key and captain Ben Stokes in delivering the news that Anderson’s record-breaking 22-year international career was coming to an end at the age of 41.

In his new book, Finding The Edge, serialised in The Sunday Times, Anderson writes how he thought he was going for a routine appraisal in the Dakota Hotel in Manchester in late April, only to be ushered into retirement.

He said of the moment: “As I walk towards them, it hits me cold. This isn’t a team appraisal, is it? With each footstep towards the far side of the bar, each of their distinct silhouettes coming into view, the tram journey just gone is suddenly like a blissful past life, the outdoor sun sucked into a horizonless neon-red darkness.”

And he later goes on to write: “My brain is doing the maths and my heart is sinking as I go to shake their hands. I feel like Joe Pesci in Goodfellas, ushered into a room under the impression that I’m going to get made, only to be shot. You f------. They’re going to tell me something I don’t want to be told, aren’t they? Something I’ve been swerving, darting, shapeshifting, bowling through for my whole life.”

He describes McCullum’s statement as steady and rehearsed, telling him they were looking to the future and that he would not make it to the Ashes in Australia.

Anderson goes on to compare England’s communication with two years earlier, when the interim director of cricket Sir Andrew Strauss dropped him – and his new-ball partner Stuart Broad – for a tour of the Caribbean via a 45-second phone call.

In the end, Anderson writes, all he could say was “OK” and try to process the news. How, he wrote, could it all end like this?

Anderson was given the option by McCullum, Key and Stokes to play one more Test or retire immediately. He accepted the former, picking up four wickets in the first Test of the summer against West Indies at Lord’s, where his Test career had begun 21 years earlier. It was his 188th Test, and he finished with 704 wickets.