Anderson Jimmy - Jimmy: my story

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 201213, 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 Englands all-time leading international wicket-taker, having overhauled Sir Ian Bothams record of 528. He was named one of Wisdens 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 Lloyds bestselling Start the Car: The World According to Bumble and Graeme Swanns 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
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Copyright 2012, 2013 by James Anderson

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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.

One of lifes 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 theyve been bred tough, as labourers in coal mines or on building sites. From an English perspective, you will know the kind of characters Im 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, Id better make the confession now. This fast bowlers 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 mans man. Call me a bespoke model, if you like, but those archetypal characteristics passed me by. To be fair, its hard to make aggression look convincing when youve 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, Ive 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 dads 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 Burnleys first team let alone Englands. Of course, Id 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 dads drive.

Now if youre interested enough about me to be reading this, you either like your sportsmen to be dour or you believe theres more to me than you see on the field. Because, lets face it, theres 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 publics impression of me is that I am quite a cantankerous sod. Granted, its 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, lets be honest, when that is one half of your job description, you aint 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. Secondly, there really is another side to me away from what you see on a cricket field. The more established I have become as an England player, the more comfortable I have become in showing other sides to my personality, the side that my wife Daniella and daughters Lola and Ruby know, or the one that is familiar to my close mates within the team, such as Graeme Swann and Alastair Cook.

But, equally, I take my work very seriously. Probably more seriously than you realize. To such an extent, in fact, that I actually practise being confrontational, aggressive and generally in-yer-face. I analyse my own performances, not just in terms of my bowling but how I have conducted myself. Because, I have discovered, I tend to be more effective as a bowler when I am chuntering at opponents or involved in a full-on and frank exchange of views than when I am not.

Us fast bowlers tend to have an attribute that gives us an edge over our opponents, and mine is actually being something of a mardy bum. Because I have not got express pace like Shoaib Akhtar, nor am I built like a brick outhouse like Chris Tremlett, or look down from 6 ft 7 in like Steve Finn, I need something else in my armoury as a fast bowler to help give me that edge over the batsmen.

In international sport you are always looking for that extra something that gives you an advantage in a contest. A lot of the time the skill alone will play the biggest part, but when you come across someone who is just as good a match, if not better than you, you need that little bit more, that other thing. My thing is the chat.