Finding the Edge

"In Jimmy Anderson’s autobiography, from the opening pages you know you’re going to get something very honest and with a good deal of reflection. We join him, having been told: ‘You’re old now, Jimmy, we don’t need you any more. Your life as a top rank cricketer is over.’ He’s sat on his own reflecting how difficult that is going to be for him. Eventually he realises that sitting on a bench looking at an empty cricket field might be a nice, not a sad thing, to do. It can prompt those feelings, what cricket gave him. Then we get his story—how, even from when he was a young child, he felt there was something in him, and he didn’t know what it was. He felt different, like he didn’t belong. That’s beautifully expressed. So we learn how cricket filled that hole in his life. It’s an interesting take on what it means to be a top class sports person. Everyone who succeeds in sport has to devote themselves to their craft. It’s more than 10,000 hours. You give your life to it. And you think, well, what makes someone want to be so focused? You get an insight into that with this book. It’s like he’s born with this need to fill something. Cricket can give him that sense of competition, camaraderie, a sense of belonging, of being needed. His ghost writer, or collaborator, Felix White is given a name check. That’s a good thing. I don’t like it when they hide who the ghost writer is. He has gone to great lengths to find Jimmy’s voice. There are autobiographies that feel like they are written for teenagers because they are so basic. This is a grown-up, reflective book. And you do need a really good ghost writer to enable someone to explore those ideas. I very much doubt that, if you’d just given Jimmy Anderson a pad and pen, he’d have constructed it this way. It would be difficult for any of us to do that. You need to collaborate, to find a way to convey the story to the audience. Sometimes you don’t get to know someone if all they do is say ‘I joined this club, then I left that club, then I had two children…’ You don’t get to know someone if they just list their achievements. You need to dig, and you’re only going to dig if you do it with a good collaborator."