You know you are a fortunate cricketer when not one but two separate cricketing outfits desire to pick you in their team. You also know you are something out of the extraordinary when you appear an unlikely star in the Cricket World Cup’s super over contest. Furthermore, you know you have something going for you when you can down and on multiple occasions, a world class batsman like Steve Smith. Ain’t that right? But you also know that cricket can be a very hard game at times that perhaps takes around as much from you as the goods it lavishes on you. And if you resonate with each of the above, then you are Jofra Archer, of England national cricket team.
A bowler on whom one can always count to bowl a yard quicker than most others even when the outstanding athletes around appear tired and waned out, Jofra Archer on the cricket pitch usually means a harrowing experience for the batsmen. Then, even if it’s a Virat Kohli or a Kane Williamson or Marnus Labuschagne, it doesn’t really matter.
But the Jofra Archer that one sees nowadays looks a world adrift from the happier days he’s already embraced in a rather young cricketing career. Dealing with an elbow injury that left him reeling in pain and saw him sit out from the IPL (in entirety, until its cancelation), Jofra Archer isn’t beaming with joy; rather the right-arm fast medium is waiting with bated breath the time he will find himself back on the ground.
Stating his frustration with the painful elbow injury in no uncertain terms, the Barbados-born pacer shared that if he doesn’t get his elbow right and how he wants it, he might even stop playing any further cricket.
Now if this doesn’t sound like a shocker to you, then what could be any more shocking?
He is already ruing the very fact that he might have to sit out of the five Tests that his England side are to play against India later during England’s summer. What the ECB have maintained is that the imminent future will be about Jofra Archer’s complete rehabilitation programme.
Here’s what the pacer himself had to say, ” The way I am looking at things is that I would rather miss a few weeks of a year so that I have a few more years in my career.”
Moreover, mentioning his desire of playing in the forthcoming T20 world cup as well as participating in the famous Ashes series, Archer would further add, “One thing I am determined about post-elbow operation is not to rush my comeback,” Archer wrote in his column in the Daily Mail, “because my primary focus is to be playing for England in the Twenty20 World Cup and Ashes later this year.”Those are my targets. If I come back before then and manage to play in the home Test series against India — then fine, so be it. If I don’t, I am quite prepared to sit out the summer.”
All of the above said, what might befuddle the die-hard Jofra Archer fans is the inevitability of asking as to when might he return to the centre of the action? Though, of that, very little can be said in any certain terms.