'I was seen as an odd person who liked cricket. I felt like an outcast'

The big interview Jimmy Anderson The country's greatest bowler on how cricket saved him from loneliness as a teenager, Bazball, and why his wife, Daniella, is still mad at England

- Donald McRae

"I'm not getting too dark here," Jimmy Anderson says quietly as we return to a time when he was a solitary boy in Burnley, "but I remember sitting in my room thinking: 'I wish I wasn't me. I wish I was someone else.' That's not a great place to be at 14. I didn't fit in at school or have a group of mates. The biggest thing for me then was the feeling of being lonely.

"I didn't have close friends. We didn't play cricket at school. I was seen as a bit of an odd person who liked cricket. Why would you like cricket when you can play football and these other amazing sports? I did play them, but obviously not to the same level as cricket. I just felt like an outcast."

Anderson is 42 now but still carries the lean and hungry look of the greatest English Test bowler there has ever been. But he was hurt again in April when Brendon McCullum and Ben Stokes ended his Test career. In his revealing and often moving book about cricket and life, which he wrote with Felix White, Anderson describes the encounter in jolting terms: "As I walk towards them, it hits me cold. This isn't a team appraisal, is it? I feel like Joe Pesci in Goodfellas, ushered into a room under the impression that I'm going to get made, only to be shot. You fuckers."

Andrew Strauss had tried the same cull in a 45-second phone call in 2022. Anderson refused to surrender and came back fitter and more determined. He writes: "I guess you'd rather be stabbed in the front than the back. This time, it's different. It's both kinder and harsher, more sympathetic and more ruthless and, worst of all, nauseatingly final."