This story doesn’t start well. In February 2006, Alastair Cook and Jimmy Anderson were on tour with England A in the West Indies when word came through that they had both been called up to join the senior team in India; Anderson as a replacement for Simon Jones, who had damaged his left knee, Cook as cover for Michael Vaughan, who had damaged his right. Cook and Anderson had been on tour for a fortnight already but somehow hadn’t spoken a single word to each other in all that time. Now they found themselves facing each other in a pair of first-class seats on the first flight out of Antigua. When Anderson sat down, Cook looked at him and said: “The last time we met, you called me a cunt.”

This was at the fag end of the previous season, in a championship match between Essex and Lancashire. The previous week Cook had taken 214 off the Australians in a two-day game, and, as Anderson later said, “we thought he had a bit of arrogance about him”. So Anderson decided to put Cook back in his box. Cook c Symonds b Anderson 19. “I can’t tell you my first impressions of him, because he called me everything under the sun,” Cook said, later. “The only words he had said to me for two years before then were swear words.” Now they had two days of travel ahead, to Nagpur via London. Cook would recall: “And I was thinking: ‘This is going to be an interesting 48 hours.’”

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Anderson mumbled an apology, said he hoped Cook hadn’t taken it personally, that he treated almost every batsman that way. Cook laughed. They got to talking, and they were still going eight hours later when the plane touched down in London. During their layover, Cook saw a headline on Teletext announcing that Marcus Trescothick was also leaving the tour. He did a quick calculation in his head. Matt Prior was the only spare batsman in the England squad, which meant Cook would likely make his debut in the next Test. Anderson, who had already played 12 Tests by that point, agreed with him, and the two talked it through; the point being that Anderson and Cook have been there for each other from the beginning.

They didn’t play in the same Test team until later that year, in the first match of the 2006-07 Ashes. Australia won by 277 runs, Cook made 54 in two innings, and Anderson took one for 195. Since then, they’ve played together in another 101 Tests. And later this summer they will likely break another record and become England’s two most frequent team‑mates, which is fitting, because they are as close as a couple of cricketers can be. “My best mate,” says Cook of Anderson. “One of my closest friends,” says Anderson of Cook, whom he made godfather to his eldest daughter. They are similar sorts, both uneasy in the company of strangers, both much sharper among friends than they seem to be in public.

In cricket, famous names often come conjoined. Quicks such as Lillee and Thomson, spinners such as Laker and Lock, openers such as Greenidge and Haynes, sometimes middle-order men such as Sangakkara and Jayawardene. Anderson and Cook, opening bowler and opening bat, aren’t a natural combination. And if, taken together, their names sound like a property law firm in Finchley, it’s because they are. But they have combined more often than many might realise. Of course there are the catches, for a start, c Cook b Anderson, 31 in all, an England record, the most taken by an outfield player off a single bowler.

Then there is their batting. In 2007, Anderson and Cook were made “batting buddies”, and set to work in the nets together. Cook was surprised to find that Anderson didn’t have a bat contract, so got on the phone to Gray Nicholls and rustled him up a deal. For a time the two of them had nearly identical kit. Cook tried to show Anderson some new shots but he soon abandoned that and taught him, instead, how to start thinking like a batsman. The upshot was that Anderson became England’s nightwatchman. And the two of them ended up sharing a short string of stands together: 66 against India at the Oval, 59 against South Africa at Headingley, 46 against the West Indies in Antigua. “I can’t explain it,” Anderson wrote, “sometimes you just gel.”

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As their decade together has worn on, they’ve become the two towers England are built around, the tent-poles of the team. The leader with the bat and the leader of the attack. In fact Anderson wanted to be captain himself, and said he was “gutted” when the job of being Andrew Strauss’s deputy was given to Cook instead. But Cook, Anderson wrote in his book, “is someone I trust implicitly”. The feeling is mutual. “In my eyes,” Cook has said, “Jimmy is England’s best bowler of all time.” Together, they have been at the heart of some of England’s most famous victories: the win in Australia in 2010-11, when Cook was leading run-scorer and Anderson leading wicket-taker; the win in India in 2012-13, when Cook again scored more than anyone and MS Dhoni described Anderson as “the difference between the sides”. And each night, in between their daily deeds, likely as not they’d gather around a board in their hotel for another game of darts.

Then, on the last day of this latest Test, those twin landmarks. Cook’s 10,000th Test run and Anderson’s 450th Test wicket, which helped him to become the ICC’s top-ranked Test bowler for the first time in his career. For a generation of England fans, the records they’ve both broken seemed to have entirely ossified, unchanged in the pages of 20 successive Wisden Almanacks. Graham Gooch was the leading run-scorer; Ian Botham the leading wicket-taker. Anderson and Cook have both now pushed past and on beyond, climbing higher into still rarer air. Cook is one of only 12 men to have scored 10,000 or more, Anderson one of only six to take 450. Only the very best of the modern era are above them. And now, for the first time since SF Barnes and Jack Hobbs were playing together before the first world war, England’s leading Test run-scorer and leading wicket-taker are playing in the same team at the same time.

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Cook and Anderson own one more record too, one less celebrated, but perhaps more satisfying. They are the only English players who have won 50 Tests. Cook has won 54 Test matches, the most of any Englishman. Anderson is second behind him, on 52. And in those matches Cook’s batting average shoots up to 56, and Anderson’s bowling average drops down to 21. Between them, they have led English cricket for a decade. And yet neither has become front-page famous, nor what you would call, by the standards of some of their contemporaries, fabulously wealthy. Because neither has excelled at, or even especially applied themselves to, Twenty20, but has preferred, instead, to toil in Tests.

If anything, it feels as if Anderson and Cook are both a little under-appreciated by the wider press and public, that we won’t quite realise how good we’ve had it until they’re gone. You guess neither of these two unassuming men minds all that so very much, that fame and money weren’t the rewards they were after anyway. Last September they met again, when Essex played Lancashire at Chelmsford, just as they had a decade beforehand. In the first innings, it was Cook lbw Anderson 0. And this time, happy as Anderson was with the wicket, dejected as Cook was with the dismissal, no one swore – and even the batsman could smile.

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