Bowlers fight for everything they get. At first they have to fight the odds that they will make it to the top level. Then they have to fight to get a professional game at all. Then a game for their country. Then they fight the batsmen that is trying to end their spell, their day, their Test, their career. But you get that first wicket if you are lucky, or that 50th. A few even get 100, or 300, or, even for those at the top of the game, their 400th. It doesn't stop there.

It isn't just the batsmen - it's the media, injuries, bad coaches, terrible administration, silly selections, unhelpful groundsmen, your team-mates, that next bright young thing. That is all in your way, in your head, trying to stop you from becoming the best you can be. To be what you have always wanted to be.

Great.

But the best just keep going. They bowl until their body, or minds, can't bowl anymore. They bowl with injury, with pain, through break-ups, through tragedies, through poor form, through personal issues, on roads and highways, against ever-increasing bats and batsmen, in a sport that seems to have been invented just to remind them they are second-class citizens.

After all that, the ones who make it, who survive, who thrive, then have to beat the villainy that is our group-fan subjective mind. We can't just enjoy them, we have to work out how good they are, where they fit. Sure, he is good, and he's done this for ten years, and bowled more balls and taken more wickets than anyone in his country before him. But is he a great? An all-time great? One of the best of all time?

While we do this, he creates something special.

Jimmy Anderson has bowled cricket balls that tattoo themselves on your memory. That Anderson curve is something you will always know. It is part of your experience as a cricket fan. You may not like him, you may think he isn't as good as others, is an over-rated presence in cricket because of his Big Three pedigree, or that his average (currently 28.62, his lowest mark since 2003) just isn't good enough for you to consider him to be a great. But that curve, you like that. Everyone likes it, unless they are playing against it, or hoping their team can survive it.

Can he do it all the time, on all surfaces, against all batsmen, in all countries? No, but when he does it, that doesn't make it any less amazing. Swing bowling is art, and Jimmy paints.

James Anderson was again too much for Dasun Shanaka to handle Getty Images

Forget the grumpiness, forget the English media pushing him, forget the fact he can never be Dale Steyn (and nor can most other players), and just watch that swing. That ball is making shapes that HR Giger or Zaha Hadid would kill for. His bowling trajectories should be hanging in some modern art museum or spray-painted on walls. At his most dramatic, the ball has a mind, and mood, of its own. At his most skilful he has it on a string and points it in one direction before telling it to go another.

It is beautiful.

At Headingley, you would expect even more than that. But it's not how it has gone for him before.

Headingley swings. It swings more than a hot brass band playing at a swingers' party. If you are a swing bowler, it is the place you dream of taking the new ball, the place you get the new ball, and usually the place to destroy with the new ball. Over the last few years, the great, good and ordinary of world cricket have all done well here. People who ended up in jail, people who had lost their nip and people who were practically unknown, have all done well, and far better than Anderson.

Worse than that, two years ago it was the pitch that made him cry, when he failed to last the distance with the bat.

He hated Headingley. "Hated it". Not the words of a tabloid hack slamming his keyboard in ambitious glee but the words of the greatest wicket-taker England have ever had, about the swing-bowling paradise that was all but designed in wait for his presence.

Finally, after nine years of his hate, it happened. That curve, and the wickets that followed. That ball to Dasun Shanaka, that seemed to follow an exponential swing graph. Others were so hypnotising that the bats seemed naturally drawn to them, despite the fact it would surely end in death. Batsmen missed straight ones while still worrying about the squiggly line ones they had missed moments earlier.

The Sri Lankan batsmen became so faceless during this onslaught that the scoreboard started putting up pictures of the wrong players. Their role, which they played to perfection, was to edge the ball, miss the ball, and participate in the Jimmy Anderson hat-trick of wicket maidens.

At the end of this game there were no tears, just a small smile.

You can, and will, argue about whether he is great or not. You can say he was in his home conditions, against (as Colin Graves might accidentally call them) a "mediocre" batting line-up, but when the ball came out of his hand in this match, it was a tremendous thing to watch.

This Test won't change anyone's mind as to whether he is an all-time great or not. This Test was just Anderson bowling at somewhere near his best - and whatever your opinion of his status - it was pretty damn good. Not for the first time in his career, and hopefully not for the last.

Greatness is subjective. Art is subjective. Ten for 45 is objective, and in this match, it produced great art.