Poor Jimmy Anderson

This has to be one of the funniest quotes in a while (taken from Cricinfo's quotes page). Folks, here we have James Anderson professing ignorance about why Fidel Edwards subjects him to a "barrage of bouncers and verbals whenever he comes to bat":

I'm not sure what I've done. I don't have a clue. He just seems to crank up every time I come in, and I get a few words.

This is so plaintively said that one might be tempted, as the un-ironic reproduction (presumably) of this quote shows, to take Anderson seriously, and wonder why, indeed, does Fidel bother our poor Jimmy so. But of course, all one has to do is to remember that Mike Atherton memorably said about the same Jimmy, on observing one of his periodic outbursts directed at batsmen, that he'd be a rich young man if he got paid by the word.

Lesson for Jimmy: when you bowl, your actions are observable, not just to the batsman facing you, but to his team-mates sitting in the pavilion (oh, I don't know how, maybe because they were watching television, and even managed to see the slow-motion replays of your snarls and curled lip?) and they might just be inclined to take up cudgels and let you have a little taste of your own medicine.

Anderson is an unbearably petulant little ninny when he bowls; my only regret in this Edwards episode, which sadly, I appear to have missed, is that Fidel didn't manage to knock some sense into that pretty little head, preferably with a ringing-in-the-ears-inducing knock on the helmet.