Nearly six years after Jofra Archer made his Test debut against Australia at Lord’s he will finally return after England confirmed that he will replace Josh Tongue as the only change to the team so comprehensively beaten by India at Edgbaston last week.
Archer is a man of few words and, as he has battled through a string of injuries across those intervening years, also not a lot of action. So the conversation that confirmed his return to Test cricket was entirely typical, said England’s captain, Ben Stokes: “I went: ‘Are you ready this week?’ And he went: ‘Been ready.’ That was literally it.”
“Jof is very unassuming. He doesn’t give a lot away. But he’s very, very passionate about playing cricket. He’s a very, very determined human being. And if he wasn’t that way inclined, he probably wouldn’t be in the situation where he’s playing tomorrow.”
Since he walked out here for a thrilling debut performance in 2019, and despite being at least in theory a first-choice player since, Archer has bowled 434.5 overs in Test cricket. That is considerably fewer than Shoaib Bashir, who would have followed the 2019 Ashes as a 15-year-old schoolboy and made his debut just last year, and only marginally more than Dom Bess, not picked since 2021. Archer has bowled only 18 red-ball overs in the past four years. So fans will gather in St John’s Wood in excited anticipation of seeing something genuinely rare and potentially thrilling.
“I don’t think there’s any reason we can’t see him operating at the level we saw here at Lord’s on his debut,” Stokes said. “I think the expectations of Jofra are completely understandable. It’s such a positive for him as a player, because of what everyone knows he can do. And that proves how skilful a bowler he is, the impact that he can have on the teams he plays for. So I don’t see that being a negative thing, the expectations around Jofra this week. Absolutely not.”
As is typical for a seamer on the day before a Test, Archer barely bowled on Wednesday, a few deliveries off a shortened run-up and well short of top speed (Jasprit Bumrah, who returns for India, did not train at all). But the hope is that the 30-year-old’s pace – in that 2019 game, he hit a top speed of 96.1mph – will bring genuine menace to a bowling lineup that has often not so much frightened India’s top order as fed them.
So far in this series, the tourists’ top four have scored 1,128 runs at an average of 70.50, England’s 571 runs came at an average of 38.06 (improved by a not out) – a difference that at Edgbaston stretched to 82.37 for India, compared with England’s 12. The series is finely poised at 1-1, but that scoreline disguises a disparity of achievements across the opening two games.
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England team v India
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Ben Duckett, Zak Crawley, Ollie Pope, Joe Root, Harry Brook, Ben Stokes (capt), Jamie Smith, Chris Woakes, Brydon Carse, Jofra Archer, Shoaib Bashir.
A positive result in the first Test applied a glossy veneer to an unexceptional England display, their victory assisted by some poor India fielding, the complete collapse of the touring side’s lower order (twice) and their own relish for chasing. This being sport, the winning side happily kept the same team for the second match, while the losing side made wholesale changes. The outcome was an even more dominant India performance, and five days in Birmingham that saw England not just beaten, but humbled.
And now the questions are manifold. Are the instructions England give to Test groundstaff – “Pretty simple: a bit of pace, a bit of carry,” according to Stokes last week – producing surfaces that maximise their chances of success? Why was the unheralded Akash Deep, in particular, able to find demons in an Edgbaston surface that England’s seamers had made to look so sleepy?
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Beyond chucking the ball at him a bit quicker, have any fresh plans been developed to curtail the astounding run of success being enjoyed by India’s captain, Shubman Gill (on which subject Stokes would only say that “we’ve obviously got plans for all the Indian batters” and “very good players are allowed to play well”)? And has the improvement in Stokes’s bowling since his hamstring operation in January, which at times this summer has looked as good as it has in years, been inspired by some diabolical trade-off with the gods of batting?
Having won the toss and chosen to bowl first in each of the first two matches, decisions widely criticised but only one actually backfiring, Stokes said that England “are not stuck in our ways around anything whatsoever”.
“You’ve obviously got to decide on something,” he said. “You’ve only really got looking up [at the weather] to maybe sway you one way or the other, and then what happens after that is completely out of your control. It’s one of those where you’ve just got to commit to it and what will be will be.”
The same is true of the decision to rush Archer back, a selection that reflects feelings of optimism and genuine excitement, and a nostalgic reverence for his performances of the regrettably distant past, but also simple relief at being able to give formidable opponents a fresh and fast test. And, perhaps, just a little desperation.
