As Jimmy Anderson bows out, Test cricket is in danger of doing likewise

Once more, with feeling. On Wednesday they let Jimmy Anderson lead the two teams on to the field for the start of his 188th and last Test. On Friday, they made him wait to be 22nd man out for its final rites. He stood a while at the top of the steps down from the Long Room and took a couple of deep breaths while the other players arranged themselves into a guard of honour on the outfield, and the full-house crowd, who had rushed to arrive right on time for the moment, rose in a standing ovation that stretched on and on, so long that by the time it was over Anderson was lost on his own in the middle of the field and beginning to break into tears.

He seemed glad when his teammates finally walked over to join him, and, one by one, slapped him on the back or wrapped him up into a hug, and gladder still when the field spread and the umpires called play for the day.

Related: Jimmy Anderson signs off with wicket in England’s innings win over West Indies

There was one last job of bowling in front of him, England had four wickets left to take, and here, at least, he knew exactly what to do with himself. He paced his run from the Nursery End, turned, tucked the ball into his grip, and took those first few short stuttering steps before breaking into his loping run up into the crease. He said later that he was so distracted he had forgotten what he was trying to bowl. The ball came out, almost inevitably, as an away-swinger off a length, the delivery as instinctive and unthinking for him as putting one foot in front of the other to walk forward is for the rest of us.

Anderson took his time over his first over. His walk back to his mark was a little slower than usual, an old bowler’s trick, from someone who knows all of them, designed to buy just a little more time for his nerves to settle between balls. There was one last wicket, his 704th, won with what was, to be honest, the best ball anyone bowled all match, a waspish away-swinger in which the ball arrowed in towards off-stump, pitched, and moved just enough to catch the outside edge of Joshua Da Silva’s bat as it flew through to the keeper. There ought to have been a 705th, too, but Anderson dropped the simplest return catch hit back at him by Gudakesh Motie.

The cliche goes that the great players write their own scripts; the truth is Anderson needed someone else to write this one for him. All he has ever wanted to do is bowl, and, left to himself, he would have gone on and on, ad infinitum, waiting for that morning they say always comes when he would wake up and find he simply didn’t want to do it anymore, and wondering why it never arrived. He’s the sort who will still be arranging his fingers into the grip for his inswinger when he’s got the Test match on in his old age, rehearsing, in his mind’s eye, exactly how he’s going to dismiss the young West Indian batter he’s watching on TV.

If they’re still playing, then, that is. This was a sorry, awkward Test, in which the contest was entirely overshadowed by the choreography of Anderson’s retirement. It was spoiled by the West Indies’ lack of a proper warmup, and a schedule which meant that some of their brightest players had spent the last six months playing T20 cricket. Shamar Joseph had bowled exactly 14 overs since he bowled out Australia in his breakthrough Test in January. While you shouldn’t read too much into one defeat – West Indies were beaten by 10 wickets the week before that same victory at the Gabba – the unavoidable truth is that the format, Anderson’s favourite, is in decline.

A week earlier, some of the most influential administrators and players in the game gathered together in this very same corner of Lord’s for the MCC’s World Cricket Connects conference. The Cricket West Indies chief executive, Johnny Grave, made the point, again, that the game needs to rearrange its finances if this format is going to survive in his region. Fewer of the men in the room seemed as worried by this as you might hope. Judging by the few conversations I had there, more of them seemed concerned about how to go about wringing more money out of the young fans who love white-ball cricket.

Tests are already fewer and further between than they were when Anderson started out in them. There is talk that if nothing changes, then there will only be five or six countries left playing it by the end of this decade. The irony is that Anderson isn’t just the first fast bowler to take 700 wickets, or bowl 40,000 deliveries, in Test cricket, but he is almost certainly the last to do it, too. Watching him play his final hour, you just wished that everyone else involved in the sport could show it the same sort of care, and commitment, that he has these past 21 years.

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