The wind was up at the Oval on Tuesday morning, blowing in low grey clouds from the south. The summer heat was gone and the light was so poor that the floodlights were on. It seemed autumn had arrived just in time for the last day of England’s season. They feel like a team on the turn themselves, this match the equinoctial point. They have lost Alastair Cook, who has opened for them in every game they have played these past 12 years, and that leaves Jimmy Anderson, 36, and Stuart Broad, 32, as the last two old hands in Joe Root’s team. They have been bowling with the new ball almost as long as Cook has been batting against it.

Jimmy Anderson’s record wicket ensures England beat India in fifth Test Read more

Cook’s retirement will have set them thinking. The three men have played 111 Tests together, a Nelson’s-worth by the sport’s lore, though it brought them nothing but good luck in this game. It is a run that started in the second Test against New Zealand in Wellington back in 2008, the week after England had been thrashed in the first at Hamilton.

That match went so badly that England decided they had to drop Matthew Hoggard and Steve Harmison, who had played 45 Tests together. The decision stung Hoggard in particular and, while Harmison played again, off and on, for another year, the Yorkshireman never did.

The situation that England team were in is very different from the lot of this one – they had lost to India the previous summer, then beaten in Sri Lanka – but it is still a reminder of how fast things can fall apart. This England team have been trying to prepare Broad and Anderson for the end for some time now, talking about how they are going to rotate their two great bowlers to manage their workload. The idea came up at the start of the summer but they never actually got around to following through on it. The national selector, Ed Smith, dropped a hint that it might happen in Sri Lanka for the three Tests in November.

Cricket can be an unforgiving game when you have been at it as long as they have. At that age, after that many games, every bad shot makes people whisper about your reflexes, every flat spell makes them wonder if you have lost your nip. Anderson has taken 42 wickets at 20 this year, Broad 35 at 26. Both have a lot left to give but on the fifth day, on a flat pitch and at the end of a series that has crammed five Tests into the space of six weeks, the two of them looked a touch weary. Well, it turns out that Broad played the last three days with a broken rib, so he had a good reason for it.

So did Anderson, in his way. Back when Fred Trueman became the first man to take 300 wickets in Test cricket they asked him if he thought his record would ever be beaten. “Aye,” Trueman replied, “but whoever does it will be bloody tired.” Anderson has got nearly twice that number now, more than any other fast bowler in the history of the game. He had pulled level with Glenn McGrath on 563 late on Monday evening, so had the whiff of the record in his nostrils all day on Tuesday, though one would not necessarily have known it from watching him bowl in the morning, when he delivered a spell of 4-0-10-0 from the Vauxhall End.

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Root pulled him from the attack after that. Broad lasted one longer. And then the odd thing was that neither came back on until after 3pm, when KL Rahul and Rishabh Pant were 145 runs into their stand and India just under 200 runs away from winning. Root may have been thinking of that nightmare at Headingley last year, when he declared on 490 for eight in the second innings, only to see West Indies make 322 to win. In that match he flogged so many overs out of the two of them early on in the innings that they had nothing much left by the time the second new ball came round.

This time Root decided to run through everyone else, even himself, before he brought the two of them back late in the afternoon. It was like a dress rehearsal for the day when he will have to do without them. The problem was that, if Root was trying to keep his powder dry, it turned out the stuff was not nearly as potent as he had hoped when he did finally bring them back into the attack. Jonny Bairstow even felt able to come up to the stumps to keep to the two of them, a shrewd tactical move meant to pin the batsmen back into the crease but still a blow to any fast bowler’s ego.

Anderson’s second spell went on long. He had toiled through all of 11 overs, for eight runs, before Root decided to use the new ball. But in all that he really had only one chance for a wicket, when Ravi Jadeja edged the ball through to Bairstow, who spilled the catch. The crowd were desperate for him now and there were imploring shouts of “C’mon Jimmy” when he turned on his mark and handclaps every time he started his run. He finally got it with the last ball of the match, in the 14th over of his spell. Mohammed Shami b Anderson 0. He was happy to follow Cook from the pitch after that, if not out of the game quite yet.