Aussies are on the run: Archer
Jofra Archer says the Australian will be scarred by the narrow loss at Headingley.
In the last weeks of a summer in which he has made an indelible imprint on English sporting history, Jofra Archer is sitting at a table in the Long Room at the Sussex county ground in Hove. This sleepy seaside town is where this most pyrotechnic of talents first exploded into the public consciousness, taking five wickets for the match on his first-class debut against a touring Pakistan side in 2016. From there, his rise has been meteoric, and now, four years after he arrived on these shores from his native Barbados, he is a central figure in perhaps the most cinematic summer that English cricket has known.
After playing a crucial role in the thrilling World Cup final win over New Zealand — in which he delivered the clinching super over — Archer was drafted into the England Test squad. He made his debut in the second Ashes Test at Lord’s, taking five wickets in the match and hitting Steve Smith on the neck in an electrifying spell of fast bowling, and we meet him in the afterglow of the extraordinary one-wicket win at Headingley, in which he took his maiden five-for in a Test.
Archer recounts the ineffable drama of Sunday from the perspective of a superstitious dressing room. “We believed that we should be in the same spot we had watched the whole game in,” he says. “I was inside watching it on the TV with (Joe) Denly and (Jason) Roy. All three of us watched it on the TV the day before. So when we came back it was back in the same spot. I went out to the window and someone said, ‘Get back, get back.’ I was like ‘OK, as you were.’ ”
When Jack Leach came in at No 11, “Because so much was riding on it, I was saying I hope he wears one. If they do bowl short, just wear it, just get through the over. When (Nathan) Lyon fumbled the run-out, you could hear a heartbeat in the dressing room.”
Archer ceded the stage ultimately to Ben Stokes and Leach after a typically free-spirited cameo of 15 from 33 balls, but for someone whose batting gives the appearance of being unconstrained by responsibility, he is strikingly self-critical of his innings.
“I thought that I wanted to make it less hard work for Ben but I got out,” he says. “I thought I had messed the series up, not just the game but the series.” He does not, however, regret his mode of dismissal, caught slogging to deep square leg.
“(Stokes) says just do it your way, and whatever you do, commit to it. I felt bad for getting out, but not in the way — I did commit to what I wanted to do.” The courage to back to their aggressive instincts, even in the longest form of the game, is hardwired into this England side, and in Archer, they have a natural figurehead for this ethos.
Archer speaks softly, and as he takes questions from a group of cricket journalists, he rarely makes eye contact, instead fingering the gold chain that hangs around his neck, or running his hand over the back of his neck, or glancing down at his phone, which is periodically illuminated by incoming notifications. It is hard to ignore the parallels between Archer the talker and Archer the bowler: in both cases, a languid style belies his ability to deliver zingers.
He is particularly brutal about the Australians. “Terrible chat, nothing to worry about. It made me laugh,” is his withering review of the sledging attempts of Tim Paine and Matthew Wade. “Never get complacent. To be fair to them 350 runs (England’s fourth-innings target at Headingley was 359) is a lot of runs. The crowd started getting on their backs. They panicked a bit.
“The upcoming games, they will think twice. I don’t think they will declare now. I don’t think they will be too attacking. I think we’ve planted a few seeds of doubt. They got to the second new ball and still couldn’t bowl us out. All of those mental facts should sit with them next game.”
What about Smith, his teammate with the Indian Premier League team Rajasthan Royals, who reported concussion symptoms after being struck by Archer’s 148km/h bouncer at Lord’s? Having missed the third Test, the world’s best batsman is due to return at Old Trafford, apparently undaunted. Smith said: “There’s been a bit of talk that he’s got the wood over me, but he hasn’t actually got me out. All the other bowlers have had more success against me, I daresay.”
“Well, I can’t get him out if he wasn’t there,” Archer retorts. “I did want to bowl at him when he came back out but he was out before I even got to come back on. I’m not saying I won’t get him out but if we don’t get him out there’s ten other people we can get out and if he’s stranded on 40 that’s not helping his team too much. I’m not here to get caught up in a contest with one man.”
Did he check on Smith’s welfare after he struck him at Lord’s? “I went to the dressing room but he wasn’t there,” Archer says. “I’ve seen him around. But you’re not going to sit and pull up a chair and have a deep conversation are you?”
One of the exceptional things about cricket’s extended time frame is the way that historic, seismic events can unfold over the course of days, weeks and even months. Archer is in the middle of a potentially generational Ashes tussle, one that may come to be remembered and mythologised in the same way as the 2005 series.
“We play it every single day as a build-up,” Archer says of that iconic series. “I think this will probably (overtake) that. People aren’t shy of telling you when they see you out in the street, so you do know that whatever you’re doing is having an impact on other people’s lives and not just your own.
“People are saying they’re enjoying Test cricket again, which is good, because a few months ago people were saying it was dying all of a sudden. Now it’s back. However you can inspire at the time, you just want to, because we’re only here for a few years. Then, hopefully one of those kids is going to take up the mantle and carry on the legacy.”
Archer could move up the batting order at Old Trafford to No 8 if James Anderson returns to the side, and he expects the Australians to target him with the short ball. That does not bother a player raised on the spice of confrontation.
“As a little boy in Barbados, the other boys would bowl bouncers at you and you get on with it, bowl some back, have a chat,” he says. “Maybe the clothes are a bit different, but nothing else is different.”
In more ways than one, Jofra Archer’s journey has come full circle.
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