Jimmy Anderson, England’s cold-weather Warne, still the ultimate magician at 40

For many years there was a Jimmy Anderson poster on the back of London buses advertising a well-known brand of bro-vitamins, the kind of everyday pill that makes men happy, toned, slabbed, thickly coiffured, good at sport, magnetic in social situations and frankly – if I can speak plainly here – stone cold model-handsome. The advert seems to have gone now which is a shame because it was very funny. What made it work was the strapline “I FEEL FANTASTIC”, pasted in throbbing alpha-dog script over a picture of Anderson staring balefully into the camera, looking chiselled and fit as ever, but wearing that familiar expression of a man marooned at a windswept rural bus stop in a pair of rain sodden plimsolls who has, just this moment, taken his first ever bite of celery.

It was never really clear if Anderson was supposed to be saying I feel fantastic, which just doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that would happen, or overhearing someone else saying it and muttering and rolling his eyes, or if this was always intended as a highly sophisticated piece of double-take branding, like hiring Mark E Smith to scoot around in a Mini covered in stickers trying to sell you a portered new-build two-bed in Fulham.

The real reason it seems timely now is that Anderson’s longevity, his basic refusal to yield, has passed from a useful tool for selling vitamins into something genuinely startling. Cricket loves its milestones. Here’s another one, a marker that really does deserve its own flag. Anderson, England’s greatest ever wicket-taker, currently the sixth-ranked men’s Test bowler in the world, turns 40 on Saturday.

Yes! Forty! Anderson hates talking about his age. He says it’s irrelevant, which is true, but also not true once you take a