Endurance

Run, run again.

This has been a gloomy week in London. July mornings can be overcast anyway, but this is gloom of a different kind, one that settles over people like a blanket and stays put for a while. James Anderson delivered his final international ball on Friday and Andy Murray drew the curtain on his men's singles career at Wimbledon. A handful of county matches and an Olympic doubles appearance remain, but at the highest level, there is an ‘ex-’ permanently attached to them now.

Their exits have played out in different timbres. Days before his final Test match, Anderson unleashed a near-unplayable display of seam bowling, taking six wickets in a 10-over spell against Nottinghamshire. Press conferences and media pieces buzzed with questions around why he needed to be nudged into retirement. Captain Ben Stokes had an answer, even if it sometimes felt like he was trying to convince himself. His team was looking forward, he said, and at 41, Anderson’s availability can only be rationed for a really short term. The next Ashes series - Tests against Australia - is eighteen months away, and they would need this time to prepare the next batch of bowlers for the rigours of an unforgiving series. Hard call, but had to be made. A farewell Test at Lord’s is the least and most they could do. London turned up for two days and a bit to see off one of England’s greats.

Andy Murray wasn’t as fortunate as Anderson. He departs without the final roar of a doting crowd. Murray played a doubles match at Wimbledon, but couldn’t recover from his latest injury in time to play the singles and leave the way he would’ve wanted: with a racquet in hand and dirt marks all over his white shirt. Retirement had loomed for a long time, and this new injury sealed his fate. No more. The well from where he drew his pain-tolerance for twenty years has run dry.

Both Anderson and Murray occupy a weird space in our imagination. Their achievements are incredible - Anderson’s a bit more stratospheric - but they don’t quite glide into the timeless debates of who gets to sit on the front tables of their sport. Instead of their names rolling off our tongues, they evoke a pause and furrowed eyebrows. With gritted teeth, we allow them their space amongst royalty, but we are ready with caveats. Anderson tuned his craft to suit seamer-friendly home conditions; unlike his rivals, Andy’s trophy cabinet isn’t overflowing. Are 700 Test wickets, 3 Grand Slams, and 2 Olympic Golds good for two careers spanning 20 years each? Meh.

**

James Anderson’s is a tough art form. Fast bowling, no matter how you do it, is a physical and biomechanical nightmare.

“The bowler pelts to the crease, the line at one end of the pitch from which he must deliver his ball, front-on, every step sending shockwaves through the knees. He reaches the crease and, still at full tilt, tries to turn sideways as he leaps into the air; the trunk rotates, the spine twists, the shoulders wrench away from the hips. For a split second, the bowler is floating above the ground. But the return to earth is a biomechanical nightmare. The back leg crash-lands first, knee and foot cocked at a strange angle; then the front foot takes a long and jarring stride ahead. The spine compresses, then grows hyper-extended. The bowling arm must come over so fast that its shoulder feels like it will burst out of its socket.”

In this lovely profile from 2021, Anderson explained to Samanth Subramanian how he pushes seven times his body weight through his legs every ball he bowls. Since his debut on a similarly overcast London morning in 2003, he has bowled more than 50000 deliveries in international cricket. More than 600 miles covered in bowling run-ups alone. It may be worth asking him, once he’s had time to reflect on his career, whether he’s prouder of the 704 Test wickets or the physical battering he endured to get there. Even in his final Test, Anderson remained relentless, gnawing away at the West Indies top order like a hawk sizing up its prey. The second innings saw him meticulously land 24 outswingers, warning Kraigg Brathwaite of the six fielders behind his bat. The 25th ball, a sharp change of pace and direction, crashed into Brathwaite's middle stump.

There is a rhythm to Anderson. He isn’t from the take-your-breath-away shelf of bowlers. Pick any from Steyn, Cummins, Rabada, Bumrah, Wasim, Waqar, Ambrose - they were/are assault weapons in athletic gear. Captains use their kind to dismantle batting teams. I won’t even bother going into the fast bowlers from the 80s, 70s and further back. Anderson is a fast bowler with the tendencies of a spinner. He takes his time setting up batters, exposes their vulnerabilities, makes them twist and turn and eventually leaves them looking like bent thermocol sticks.

On the flip side, this long game works to his disadvantage as an entertainment showpiece. If I had the money for only one ticket, there are at least twenty-five bowlers from his career-span that I’d rather watch. Give me Mitchell Starc steaming in from thirty yards and sending the stumps cartwheeling. Or Jofra Archer inducing mortal fear into the Australian dressing room. Fast bowling delivered with grace is a waste of both fast bowling and grace.

**

I have been thinking about this for a while now - what, really, is Andy Murray’s brand of tennis? How does one describe him? The more I think of this, the more this problem gets amplified because it is impossible to think of him without thinking of the three high priests of tennis artistry. The shadow of Federer, Nadal, and Djokovic is at once a great prism and a great tragedy of Murray’s career. As he tried to build his career, those guys married their aesthetics and ability with a level of consistency previously unknown in this sport. And they just kept going forever. Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic are still refusing to let up.

“The world where Roger Federer lives is very beautiful, but Andy Murray lives on Earth.” - who else, but my old reference book, Brian Phillips.

I lean on YouTube to help me out with Murray’s game. Maybe I’m missing something. There seems to be a searing forehand from the baseline, a solid backhand, and a wonderful net game. Everything, everywhere, but just not with the same volume and texture as his competition. What Murray had, as an almost unique trait, is the ability to keep going until there was nothing left to extract. Every day, then all over again the next day. After the US Open final of 2012 against Djokovic, Murray told an interviewer, “I have two black toenails.”

If the big three loom like giant brutalist buildings in a cyberpunk cityscape, the ominous soundtrack to his life is composed by a body that, clearly, was not meant for a career of this stature and intensity. He was diagnosed at 16 with a bipartite patella, a condition that meant his kneecap remained unfused. Shortly after turning professional in 2005, he faced a back injury forcing him to miss three months of tennis. This marked the beginning of a relentless battle – one against an evolving field brimming with generational talent, and another against his own rebelling body. Most athletes would’ve tapped out sooner, and for good reason.

In 2019, a moist-eyed Andy Murray hinted at retirement. “I’ve been in a lot of pain for probably 20 months now. I’ve pretty much done everything I could to get my hip feeling better. It hasn’t helped loads.” Tributes poured in. That Brian Phillips quote I used earlier is from his Murray retirement piece, aptly titled “Andy Murray Deserved a Better Farewell”. Jonathan Liew called him “a human in the land of the Gods”.

**

In that summer of 2019, England won the Men’s ODI World Cup and played a strong Ashes series at home. Anderson was not in the radar for one, and barely played a part in the other. He bowled four overs in the first Test, missed the second, then the third, and eventually had to bow out of the series with two Tests left. He was already 37. At every interview, Anderson was poked and prodded about his future. When he didn’t answer, his captains were asked the same question. How much longer?

Fast bowlers have a limited shelf-life – their bodies simply can't sustain the physical demands of the game as long as those of batters or spinners. Jasprit Bumrah is 30, has just won India a World Cup, and there is already conversation about wrapping him in cotton wool for the important series'. Rightfully so. Historically, few fast bowlers, including the all-time greats, have played Test cricket beyond 35 with sustained efficiency.

For so many reasons, 2019 feels like a distant memory now. Andy Murray rolled back his retirement, playing 23 more singles matches at Grand Slams, appearing in tournaments amidst a constant loop of injuries and rehabilitation. Trying, breaking, and then trying some more. James Anderson never considered calling time. He just kept running. Somewhere in the middle, he even added more yards to his bowling run-up. Anderson returned to the England side as a pillar of their bowling attack. He would pick 129 more Test wickets, finishing with a ridiculous 991 international wickets, topped only by two men, both spinners.

Murray’s words feel a lot more final this time. Over the next few weeks, those writers from 2019 will compose new pieces with a similar brush. Phillips, Liew, and Brijnath will pay tribute to an all-time great of tennis. They will mention how the most important career statistic for a tennis player sells Murray woefully short: three Grand Slam singles titles. There are 38 men with a better haul, and in some years there will undoubtedly be many more. But for all the open space in his cupboard, he departs tennis with a legacy of profound respect and admiration reserved only for the true elites. Let me give you a better stat to remember Andy Murray with: only eight men had more Grand Slam finals appearances, only seven won more games at Grand Slams.

But this is it. Even the timeless can apparently run out of fuel. We are at the finish line, the tape beyond which lies serious empty mornings, withdrawal symptoms, and, finally, some rest for those legs.

James Anderson’s autobiography, titled “Bowl. Sleep. Repeat.”, finishes with the line, “Genius is in the act of showing up.” Few held that tenet up better than him and Andy Murray. Their kind of genius was sometimes an acquired taste, but it was incredibly cool to watch them carry the flag of endurance at a time when music, films, conversations, and bowling spells are all getting shorter.