Photo Credit: Instagram Photo of @homeofcricket
England Men’s Managing Director Rob Key acknowledged that Jofra Archer‘s decision to participate in the 18th edition of the Indian Premier League (IPL) will delay his progress in returning to red-ball cricket by “a couple of months.”
Key revealed that the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) had initially hoped Archer would skip this IPL season to prioritize his red-ball preparation. However, recent changes to IPL regulations complicated the situation. Archer was acquired by Rajasthan Royals at the latest IPL auction for ₹12.5 crore after a competitive bidding war with Mumbai Indians.
“Jofra is always brilliant to deal with,” Key stated in an interview on Wisden Cricket Weekly’s Patreon channel. “We were like, ‘The best thing might be to miss the IPL this year and get yourself ready, and we’ll start building your loads up… if you can get through a bit of Championship cricket, and then you can start the Test summer.’ He was happy with that.
Notably, the IPL governing council has introduced a new policy which states that “Any [overseas] player who registers for [an] auction and, after getting picked at the auction, makes himself unavailable before the start of the season will get banned from participating in the IPL/IPL auction for two seasons.” As per the governing council, the only exception will be for “an injury/medical condition, which will have to be confirmed by the [player’s] home board”.
As Archer was fit and actively representing England in T20Is, he could not withdraw under this policy.
“But we had to look and see what India were going to do with [the IPL’s rules]. We thought that we could make the case that he’s still in part of a managed workload period. The problem with that was he was then bowling with two slips and a gully and bowling 90mph in the T20s in the West Indies, so it’s hard to make the case that he’s injured when he’s bowling like that,” Key added.
“They [the BCCI] came back after a bit of back-and-forth and said, ‘Well no, he won’t be allowed to go into this year, next year from then on. So then you start thinking that could be about $4 million that he loses out on there, and I don’t then feel… then it’s on him, really. You say, ‘Jof, what do you want to do? This is your career, your life. You’ll still be able to play Test cricket.’
“We believe there’s a lot of water to go under the bridge for that, but we still think he’ll be alright. We’ll just be a couple of months behind… So then Jofra decided that he felt the best thing for him was to go into the IPL [auction], which we had no issue with, and then do that loading throughout the IPL and get himself ready for the Test series that way.”
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Stay ahead of the latest cricket industry trends by subscribing to our free cricexec “daily briefing” newsletter.
Name of Author: Cricexec Staff
