Saqib Mahmood is one of Jofra Archer’s closest friends in cricket.
“With Jof the easiest thing for him to have done is just gone purely white ball,” Mahmood tells BBC Sport.
“He’d have been financially better off and had all of that. But I could always tell he wanted to play Test cricket. I just knew it.”
Mahmood could be proven right next week after Archer was called into England’s squad for the second Test against India. After an injury-ravaged four and a half years, Archer is back on cricket’s biggest stage.
It has been a story of cruel blows, hard work and false starts and one that results in the most intriguing question of all. Just what can be expected of Archer the Test bowler in 2025?
‘Like a £100m signing – a cheat code’
With the passing of time, it is easy to forget just how good Jofra Archer was in his first international summer in 2019.
A World Cup winner and an Ashes weapon, he seemingly had it all.
Aged just 24, he was bowling knuckle balls in a super over to win a 50-over World Cup against New Zealand, delivering one of the great spells of fast bowling to Steve Smith against Australia on Test debut and swinging it around corners at Headingley to take six wickets and make Ben Stokes’ miracle possible.
He took 22 wickets in four matches in that Ashes series. By his seventh Test he had taken three five-wicket hauls – as many as Andrew Flintoff managed in his entire Test career.
“It was like what it must feel like in football for guys to go and spend £100m on a player and bosh you’ve got him straight up,” England team-mate Chris Woakes recalls.
“What was quite nice is other teams didn’t know what he was capable of because they hadn’t seen him.
“It felt like a bit of a cheat code. As soon as I saw him bowl I thought he was going to dominate international cricket because he is a serious talent, especially for such a young guy.”
But if Archer’s first summer was the debut album that went platinum, the following winter was the difficult second album.
Only two wickets came across two Tests in a series defeat in New Zealand.
After he bowled 42 overs in one innings of the first Test, captain Joe Root said he had to learn “every spell counts”.
“You really have got to run in and use that extra pace to your advantage,” Root said.
England had a new toy but were reading from the wrong instruction manual.
An injury ‘burden’
Next came the injuries which have dogged the career of England’s most exciting bowler for a generation, plus a cut hand cleaning a fish tank and a breach of the Covid-19 bubble after an unauthorised trip home.
Soreness in Archer’s right elbow on the tour of South Africa was revealed to be a stress fracture in early 2020.
He came back that summer and battled through the winter but the third match of series in India in February 2021 remains his most recent Test.
Archer underwent surgery on the elbow that May, did so again the following December when the issue was not resolved and then sustained a stress fracture in his back in 2022.
When the elbow issue returned again in 2023, Archer’s career at the most ominous of crossroads.
“I remember the 2022 T20 World Cup [which England won in Australia] me and Jof were both in Dubai in a hotel watching the final,” says Mahmood, who was also out injured at that time.
“We were both a bit like ‘we would love to be there’.
“When you watched the boys win a final and all of that, you don’t have to say anything, but you just know, from each other’s faces.”
Archer has said he felt like a “burden” during the absence.
“I’ve seen a few comments, people saying ‘he’s on the longest paid holiday I’ve ever seen’,” said Archer.
“You try to not let it get to you but you can ignore 100 of them but sometimes that 101st is the straw that breaks the camel’s back.”
‘Criticism gives him another gear’ – the long road back
The result was months of rehab, completed at Sussex but mostly back home in Barbados.
His family, dogs and two parrots – Jessie and James, named after Pokemon characters – live just 150m or so from the idyllic Windward Cricket Club.
Archer would be seen in the nets there, or at the island’s famous Test ground the Kensington Oval. On occasions, Mahmood flew out to train with his England team-mate while both were coming back from similar injuries.
“He might not be vocal about it or he might not give off that impression, but Jof has very high standards,” Mahmood says.
“We had net batters who used to come in and one brought a tripod to set his camera up.
“We were a bit like ‘you what’ and I could just see Jof as well. He just cranked it up straight away. As soon as you give him a sniff of letting him do something, he does it.”
England’s management hinted at regrets in initial attempts to rush Archer back and have since developed carefully-laid plan, the work of England’s elite pace bowling coach Neil Killeen.
Archer has had a PDF mapping out every match he would play up until his Test return this summer – and an Ashes winter beyond. He has hit the vast majority to this point.
Albeit playing only white-ball cricket, neither back nor elbow have troubled Archer since he returned at the T20 World Cup last year. At that tournament no-one took more wickets for England in their run to the semi-finals, while a hostile spell at Lord’s against Australia in a one-day international in September suggested the magic was still there.
That is not to say it has been a serene return. There have been poor days and, with expectations still remarkably high, criticism too.
“People are just very quick to judge and they just go from one extreme to the other with Jof and I think that’s purely because they know how good he is at his best,” Mahmood says.
“He’ll run in and he’ll bowl 150kph and if he goes for runs, people will look at the runs and if he runs in and bowls mid-135s people will talk about his speed not necessarily his figures.
“It definitely drives him.
“He’s the kind of guy, even for me, I won’t joke around with.
“We always have a bit of a laugh, about each others’ calves and all of that, and then it just ends when he says ‘what’s your fastest ball?’ and then there’s no comeback from that.”
