Jimmy Anderson on Why the Ashes Are So Special

I made my international debut at the MCG against Australia. I had been rushed into the team so quickly that only a few years previously, I had been playing for Burnley second team. I walked out into the endless expanse of the stadium with all my team-mates – a collection of England players that, until now, I’d known only from my television, people I had barely imagined to be real. I was so fresh, my shirt didn’t have my name on the back. Nasser Hussain made me field on the boundary, in front of Bay 13, who screamed at me constantly, asking me who I was and whether I was a water boy. To be honest, I hardly knew myself. It seemed surreal to be there at all. Even though I got Aussie legend Adam Gilchrist out, we lost the game comfortably. It fed into a childhood understanding I had of Ashes cricket – a story I had grown up watching on repeat – we played Australia, we lost, and it hurt. 

I did not know then how much distance I would travel in an England shirt and how much of it would be defined by my duels with Australia. Six years later, in 2009, Monty Panesar would walk out to meet me in the middle at Cardiff, with the widest eyes I’ve ever seen, looking like a startled lamb. Somehow, we saved the Test match and with it won my first Ashes. Just a year later, Mitchell Johnson would turn to me at the non-strikers end and ask, ‘Why you chirping now mate? You’re not getting any wickets,’ before I took a breath, ran in and bowled Ryan Harris with a yorker. I turned back to Mitchell with my finger on my lips, unaware the camera had followed the whole exchange and it would be played back a million times over. Then, there was Michael Clarke at Trent Bridge in 2013, maybe the most perfect ball I’ve ever bowled, the ball seaming a fraction and clipping the top of off stump. It was the smallest, sweetest sound I had ever heard, and as I ran past Clarke, I lost myself for a moment before realising it was not the bat I had hit, but the stumps and I had clean bowled him, pointing both fingers at the wicket while he stood there. A few days later, I would still be running in, everything hurting, thirteen overs uninterrupted, before Brad Haddin edged behind for the final wicket, with Australia just nineteen short.  

For over twenty years I was in the middle of Ashes history. With every series, the intensity never lessened. There is no better feeling than beating them and nothing more hurtful more than losing to them. I’ve had plenty of both. 

My most treasured memory is from Boxing Day in 2010, bowling out Australia for 98 in the MCG – the same ground I had been dwarfed by on debut. We were 158-0 in reply by the end of the first day. The sold-out MCG, close to 100,000 in capacity, was left empty by Alastair Cook and Andrew Strauss, apart from 20,000 English fans. Even Bay 13 was completely deserted. It was the most surreal, most treasured moment in my cricketing life.