Magnificent Jimmy Anderson went up another level, says Peter Moores

“It was a world-class spell of bowling,” said England’s coach

(Getty)

From the depths of a certain draw, England plucked a grand victory. They arrived here in Barbados yesterday 1-0 ahead in the series, still barely able to come to terms with the momentous events of the final day in the second Test.

This was how it was meant to be before the tour began, the tourists winning, a fragile West Indies losing. But it took a stunning display by England’s longest serving player, Jimmy Anderson, to ensure that it happened.

So irresistible was Anderson on Saturday morning at the Grenada National Stadium – which began nine-tenths empty and rapidly filled up as news spread of the great deeds taking place – that West Indies wilted, their resistance swept away. England’s captain, Alastair Cook, suggested that it happened partly because their opponents had been keeping disaster at bay for nine days and finally cracked. They could do it no more.

Anderson was magnificent. He took three wickets in quick succession with the second new ball, he took two catches, one of them quite superb, and executed a glorious run-out.

“It was a world-class spell of bowling,” said England’s coach, Peter Moores, yesterday. “The areas he bowled, the plans he delivered, the pace he bowled – he bowled close to 90mph – was Jimmy at his best. And on that sort of pitch you need a world-class performer sometimes to open the game up.

“He found something in him that pushed him to another level. He was like a youngster again. He needed something because if you look at the wickets on that pitch, often it was when someone really got to the top with their pace.”

The pitch was little more than a disaster area for Test cricket as a whole. For four days both sides had struggled to extract any life from the surface while struggling to score at three runs an over. It made for torpid viewing at times and it needed individual performances to rise above it somehow.

England had two of them. Rarely can a player have had such a profound influence on the course of a match by being quite so ubiquitous in a single session as Anderson was. But there was also Joe Root.

In all there were nine scores above 50 in the match, eight of them scored at rates of between 36.02 runs per 100 balls and 64.29 (and that by Gary Ballance as England charged to victory with almost 18 overs at their disposal and the home side completely gone).

But Root’s masterful 182 not out came off 229 balls, a rate of 79.48 which changed the complexion of the affair. Root’s last four hundreds have all been unbeaten. Since being dropped for the final Test of the Ashes series, and being immediately restored to the team at the start of the English summer, Root has scored 1,101 runs at an average of 110.10.

The key delivery from Anderson was perhaps his first with the second new ball. It was a bouncer, it was on the button and it honed in unerringly at Kraigg Brathwaite, who had made a sterling 116 and was dumbfounded by the speed, accuracy and menace.

Everything still had to go England’s way; everything did. Marlon Samuels almost left the ball that took his edge. Shiv Chanderpaul’s edge, his awkward stance meaning that his bat was hidden, was dropped by Ian Bell, who did not therefore see the ball until late but it was taken by Cook on the rebound at the second attempt.

Anderson’s run-out of Jason Holder happened when Ballance failed narrowly to hold on to a catch at cover and parried it into the path of a quick-thinking Anderson at mid-off. All this was designed to sap an opponent’s will. England had what they came for.

“We’re trying to build a team, and I think we’ve got a real chance of becoming a very successful Test match team,” said Moores. “I want everyone to really enjoy the win, but then straight away we’re looking at where we can take it to, where we can improve and play better cricket.

“In this game we could still have played better. The win allows us to take another step forward and it gives everybody confidence. We talk about playing bold cricket and it helps when you win because it gives you something back for the hard work and gives you confidence.”

England have 15 Tests left of their mammoth sequence this year and early next and the record shows that they have now won four of their past five. Stronger opponents may lie in wait but West Indies have been nowhere near as supine as India were in England last summer.

It has been a proper Test series so far in which England have been the better team but have had to keep working hard on unresponsive pitches in the hope that something or someone might yield. Now that it has, it will be intriguing to see if the floodgates open here in sun-kissed Barbados.