Distraught Jofra Archer has been left cursing his luck and his injured elbow after it ruled him out of England’s entire Ashes summer.
Archer is now facing a battle to try and get fit for England’s World Cup defence in October thanks to a recurrence of a stress fracture of a right elbow that has disrupted his career for three years.
But even though Archer may be feeling devastated and frustrated by his repeated injury problems there is nothing but support for him from the ECB, who are keeping the faith in one of their most prized assets who has delivered on the biggest stage and is desperate to do so again.
And the hope is that he will once again be able to produce his best for England in one format or another just like Aussie skipper Pat Cummins did after his early career was plagued by stress fractures of the back.
“He's got another stress fracture in an elbow that’s been trouble for a long time,” said managing director Rob Key. “The poor lad is pretty distraught about what's happened and he deserves a bit of luck to be honest. I'm sure there is going to be a fairly taxing road that he's got to go down to get this fixed and get this sorted but I'm sure we'll see him back at some point.
“I've seen people like Pat Cummins miss a lot of cricket at the early stage of his career and now Australia are starting to see the benefit. He's been able to put season after season together. You just hope that down the line Jofra will overcome this and that his body will get robust enough to deal with the rigours of everything.”
And it is every format that Archer wants to play. There is no thought in the 28-year-old’s mind of giving up Test cricket to concentrate on white-ball only. But for now he is struggling even to make through the shortest format without an issue, something that has even the ECB’s science boffins baffled.
“At the moment all cricket’s been too much for his body to cope with and we need to get past that,” added Key. "He’s desperate to play Test cricket and I hope he gets the chance to do that. It’s quite a unique situation and has baffled a few of the specialists who have been involved from the start.
“I think when something like this happens you look at every single thing. You look at the whole thing we've had in place right from before Christmas when we had everything mapped out for how we wanted him to get back to getting ready to play in the ashes and then the World Cup.
“The fact is that he's not been able to bowl more than four more overs without feeling any sort of pain so regardless of the way that we've gone whether it's been right or wrong, I don't think I'd change anything because you getting to the point where actually he's had an issue that we need to just solve now.
“We are going to look at every single thing we've done. Everything we've done has been what we thought was the right thing for the player first, not actually for anyone else.
“We’ve tried to work out what's the best way for him to be able to have the best career he can possibly have and that's not worked out, so we will look at every single thing.
