Jofra Archer is caught between an Ashes rock and a Mega Auction hard place

Jofra Archer has sensationally re-entered the Mega Auction and people on the internet are annoyed. You’ve got to hand it to the Indian Premier League. It is relentlessly inventive in its language, even if the direction of travel is always towards exhaustion by superlatives. So a six becomes a HyperWang Mobile Attack Maximum, a good catch the Standard Cement Super Happy Sex-grab Of the Day. By the same process, what could possibly be better than an auction? A big auction? A very big auction? No. Only a Mega Auction will do.

To be fair this really is a Mega Auction. Scheduled to take place from Sunday into Monday, the IPLMA will see 1,054 players whittled down to just over 100 available slots, offered up on this occasion in disruptive, schedule-defining three-year contracts. For the players at the centre this is basically your life, your pension, your future. Kneel before Zod, muscular Kiwi impact all-rounder. We own you now.

Naturally the event is being sold as theatre, live from the Benchmark Arena in Jeddah, with the 10 franchises represented ideally by the classic lineup of Legend, Executive and In-House Super-Nerd, there to whisper anxiously between bids and look awkward in team colours.

Best of all, and in keeping with its Mega sweep, this is not happening in the gap between the first and second Test of Australia versus India, the biggest red-ball event of the year. And not immediately before or after either. Instead it will take place on days three and four of the current first Test in Perth, an effortlessly disorientating alpha move from the Board of Control for Cricket in India.

Can we just linger, a little bit, in that Australian sun? This is in so many ways the perfect Test series: the 21st-century power versus the classical aesthetic of greens and whites, slab-chested slip cordon, the great abrasive Australian outdoors.

Even the buildup to that thrillingly fast-forward first day in Perth was textbook. Reflexively, like an old dog kicking its legs out in its sleep, 54-year-old Glenn McGrath has spent the week “targeting” Virat Kohli in the media, talking about pressure and going hard and calling Kohli “emotional”, which in this context is clearly the very worst thing he could be, McGrath basically saying he drinks elderflower cordial and is afraid of wasps.

From an Anglo perspective the optics are perfect, kicking off at that point in the English winter when it’s suddenly so cold just stepping out of the front door makes you want to vomit into your sleeve, when the colours of the southern summer are strangely hypnotic, bounced around the world into your late-night screen, those lovely bleached-out greens and yellows, the hard white sun, Pat Cummins in creamy whites looking like the impossibly handsome captain of the intergalactic fleet.

At which point, as these deep Test cricket orthodoxies start to settle in around you, enter the IPL and a reminder that the sun does not in fact revolve around this dying planet. Oh, did you really think that was what was happening here? Don’t mind us while we walk straight across your picnic blanket. But enjoy the moment. Because we can, and literally will, buy every single one of you.

View image in fullscreen Jofra Archer bounces Australia’s Glenn Maxwell in the third ODI in September in Durham. Photograph: Greig Cowie/Shutterstock

In the middle of all this, it is worth having some sympathy for Jofra, a man lodged right at the heart of these conflicting tides, a year to the day from the start of the next Ashes series and feeling the pull of England; but like everyone else blinded also by the career-defining light of the Mega Auction.

Archer deserves a little sympathy here. Initially he withdrew from next year’s IPL. The England and Wales Cricket Board is keen to manage his workload. The plan, the vision, Rob Key’s impossible fever dream as he lies awake at night in his chino-pyjamas, is to get an overseas Ashes series out of Archer next winter.

It is, to be fair, a delicious prospect in theory. Archer-Wood-Atkinson-Carse is a deeply sexy bowling lineup. With this in mind there has, for the first time, been a slight hint of ambient frustration at the latest turn in an endlessly muddled career. England have been paying Archer something like £800,000 a year with the idea of retaining control, of preserving his precious physicality, saving him up for a defining moment.

Going to the IPL in April will mean he is out of that cycle, that he won’t be able to play early season red-ball cricket, with the faintly absurd idea that the best possible course for this butterfly on a wheel is bowling with a spongy ball in the spring to prepare himself for something he basically can’t do anyway in the winter.

There are two things worth saying about this. First, the idea of Jofra actually playing a significant role in the Ashes is an act of willed nostalgia.

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He still has wonderful skill and startlingly easy speed. But he can barely get through back-to-back T20s. His last red-ball game was three and a half years ago. Talking about Jofra and Test cricket is like talking about the Stone Roses releasing another album. It’s wilful escapism, chasing the past, building a bar in your suburban garage and trying to get the old gang back together.

It is worth remembering, as this process reaches a way point, that England injured Jofra properly in the first place, with the unfortunate events of 2019 and the following year. We remember the slightly grisly eight-over fitness Test (“show us some fire”) with an undetected stress fracture in his arm.

Secondly, and more to the point, Archer is obviously right to look first at what is actually there in front of him. The IPL is pulling hard at those old bonds right now. Life is short. Pain is real. The money is too good. Even if Archer does go to India in April there’s enough late season red-ball stuff to prepare him for Perth and November 2025.

Does it matter if he just basically turns up and does that? Trust the shapes, the action, the fact he essentially bowls the same beautifully simple ball (wrist, bounce, line, seam), that he is in effect a portable set of high-end skills.

England bowling plans generally fail in any case. Wood and Archer in 50-degree heat on a flat one trying to fight off the physical reality, the bowl-or-die career killer, is a chaotically brilliant idea.

But it is, like everything else, hostage both to common sense and the structural forces of what is, it seems, the real world. Here is the most Mega thing about the Mega Auction. The 10 IPL teams will disburse £120m a year in basic salaries across those two days. By the end of the season they will also have dished out more in additional match fee payments (£13m) than the Hundred’s entire £9m salary budget.

Test cricket has survived this long by telling you it matters, by projecting gravity, drama, status, ritual. Money, on the other hand, will just walk through the middle of whatever you’re doing and drag you in its wake. Jofra didn’t make this world. Let him do what he wants. Let’s face it – control went out of the window some time back.

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