James Anderson's Profile by CricketArchive

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Player:

JM Anderson

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DateLine: 3rd June 2008

 

Anderson is a genuinely quick fast bowler who has a very clever Yorker and can swing the ball in at great pace. He made his ODI debut due to Andy Caddick’s injury and joined up the team touring in Australia in 2002. With the 2003 World Cup round the corner, he produced some great spells to get selected for the championships.

 

Banking on some good ODI performances, he was selected for the opening Test of the new season against Zimbabwe, where he made an instant impression, taking his first five wicket haul. Since then, he has been a shadow of his good bowling self, with some mediocre performances against Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

 

A spate of injuries followed, especially his lower back was too fragile and he broke down with regularity, sometime on tour. As a result, he was reduced to being just a passenger most of the time, if at all fit and chosen for the side. He did make a return in 2006 against India, playing a good role in the victory at Mumbai, but broke down again immediately after that. Lack of match fitness forced him out of the Ashes in Australia later that year and he played through the 2007 World Cup with a broken finger.

 

On whatever occasions he has been able to play, he has managed 70 wickets in 22Tests at a not so decent average of 38.77, while in the ODIs, he has done a shade better taking 121 wickets in 86 matches at 29.25 per wicket.He and Stuart Broad spearheaded a young England attack in place of the out-of-form Steve Harmison and Matthew Hoggard for the second Test of England's series against New Zealand in the winter of 2008, and it appeared to inspire him. His 5 for 73 helped England square the series, and though his old waywardness returned with depressing inevitability in the final Test, he was back among the wickets three games later against the Kiwis at Trent Bridge, when his hostile full-pitched late swing accounted for each of the first six wickets to fall. In addition, his batting - for so long superfluous - started to come into its own, as a brave career-best 34 against a rampant South Africa at Headingley would later prove.