Posted by As in ‘returned’. He hasn’t got ankylosing spondylitis or anything. But is he match fit? Going into the third Test, we would argue that his greatest attribute is that he hasn’t just bowled 80 overs.
You may remember Jofra Archer from Test matches such as England against Australia at Lord’s in 2019, when he bounced the shit out of Steve Smith; or perhaps from England v India at Ahmedabad in 2021, when he was significantly outbowled by Joe Root.
We like Jofra Archer and we strongly disagreed with some of the insane whisperings about him. At the same time, ours is a qualified excitement. In particular, we’ve found it hard not to roll our eyes at the BBC repackaging some Chris Woakes quotes so that they could describe him as “a £100m cheat code”.
If you saw Archer renounce tiredness to discomfit (an understatment) peak form Steve Smith on his Test debut (on his debut!), you’ll still remember that sense of witnessing an out of the ordinary passage of play that you knew then and there would go down in the annals.
At the same time, that was six years ago and his Test record remains pretty damn thin for someone attracting daft headlines.
With 42 wickets at 31.04, Archer’s record is in fact slightly inferior to that of Ian Peebles, who took 45 wickets at 30.91 in the same number of matches (13) in the 1920s and 30s.
Maybe we haven’t been paying attention, but we don’t remember anyone ever suggesting that Ian Peebles was a £100m cheat code sort of player.
Maybe it didn’t need saying. Maybe it was just a given.
What Archer does have in his favour, in the context of this England v India series, is freshness. To watch England’s quick bowlers labouring in the last Test was to watch three men competing with each other for the blessed release of the bench.
Josh Tongue has emerged victorious. Have fun lying down for five days, Josh.
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Steve Smith’s discomfiture on Jofra’s debut will indeed live long in the memory, but is it also still the peak of the latter’s Test career?
(Nearly asked if it was the peak of the latte’s Test career there, which is probably a feature in itself)
I think his peak was probably the 6-45 in Australia’s first innings at Headingley. Gets overshadowed by everything else that happened in that match but he bowled very well and looked like he had more gears to his bowling than just pure pace.
Archer may have only played 13 tests so far but he has as many five wicket hauls as Flintoff got in 79 tests
I haven’t watched the Headingley 2019 highlights recently but this might be a good shout. My impression at the time, partly based on a disastrous lunchtime trip from the office to a local pub to see England lose more 1st Innings wickets than you’d think possible in a lunch break, was just that everyone involved in the match, apart from Stokes (and Jack Leach, of course) forgot how to bat. That may have coloured my view of the bowling figures.
(Incidentally, the stat about Flintoff’s lack of 5 wicket hauls gets mentioned quite a bit but that was never what Flintoff was about, really – as I think has been argued at east once by the proprietor of this very website)
I have it on good authority that in 1920s money, Ian Peebles was a 1.7m guineas cheat code.
Am I right in recalling that Joe Root over-bowled Jofra , possibly contributing to his injury breakdown? He should always be a 3-4 over spell impact bowler.
Yes.
There was a decent debunking of this somewhere. Don’t know where though. Or what they said.
Certainly the fish tank injury was unrelated but he was bowled a hell of a lot for a year of Test cricket and has since suffered stress fractures in multiple body parts. There doesn’t need to be direct cause and effect for there to be truth in the assertion.
Ian Peebles was a decent leg-spinner. The idea was he would mystify the Australians. Perhaps Jofra could extend his career by following suit.
I like the idea of a 90mph googly.
I have always rather facetiously said that the lasting legacy of Joffra Archer’s test career will be the test career of Marnus Labuschagne, and that would be a terrible (Labu)shame if true. Fingers crossed a more conservative approach to spell length yields a few more 6-fers and a few less stress fractures