https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/c...-commitment-dont-understand-fast-bowling.html
'If I had to bowl at 90mph every ball, I would be lucky to play half a season': England pace ace JOFRA ARCHER tells MARTIN SAMUEL that those who doubt his commitment don't understand fast bowling
Jofra Archer is staring wistfully out at the Wanderers wicket, the fastest track in the world according to many, all thin Johannesburg air and bounce. The ground is largely empty now, the series over. Archer featured in a single Test, the one England lost in Centurion.
'The thing is, I really, really wanted to play,' he murmurs. 'Not many days you get a nice, fast bowling wicket. Seeing Mark Wood bowl, seeing Anrich Nortje bowl, I would have been biting the coach's arm off to play.'
So that's the question about Archer's commitment to Test cricket answered. We're sitting in the one spot he has come to know well at the Wanderers, the dug-out where the water carriers and replacement fielders reside.
Archer has sprung from there on various occasions over the last four days, with drinks, with towels, with fresh equipment. Even then, observers try to read his demeanour. Does he look happy, does he look engaged, as if there is a proper level of focus involved in handing a batsman an isotonic drink.
Ice is melting around our feet, much as the furious enthusiasm around Archer has been slowly melting since winning the World Cup in the summer. Then, and after the Lord's Test in which his duel with Steve Smith riveted a nation, he was England's fast-bowling saviour.
Now he has even been depicted by some as its problem child. Questions have surrounded his fitness, his commitment, his enthusiasm for the long-form game. Kevin Pietersen even claimed England risked losing him without better care.
Yet, up close, the most striking aspect of Archer is his youth. He may have a wispy beard, and the capability to bowl extraordinarily fast, but he is in his own way, at 24, every bit as callow as Ollie Pope — certainly given his lack of experience in the English scheme.
The majority of Test players will have been known to the coaches, the selectors, to each other since their teenage years. Archer is new. His pathway into the English game is entirely different. Like Pietersen, he felt let down by his native country, and changed sides. Maybe that is why Pietersen projects his own struggles with authority on to the new man. Certainly, this winter, Archer has felt negative scrutiny and sympathy in equal measure, much as Pietersen once did.
Only when Friday morning found him in tears, as a painful right elbow again left him unable to play, was there an insight into his true feelings, beyond idle speculation about loyalties.
'It was a delayed start, so the coach said, "Take your painkillers, have a bowl, and let us know how you feel",' Archer recalls. 'He said we had up until the toss to make the decision. I thought I was in good contention to play but also that I didn't want to go in and then not be able to. I've seen the team stuck with four bowlers and the shared workload isn't great.
'But, against that, I haven't been able to play all year. So I just wanted to get out there in this last game, especially on a wicket that helps fast bowlers. But then the decision got taken out of my hands because I was not 100 per cent fit. It wasn't to be. That's why I was in tears.'
Archer, for all his qualities, feels vulnerable, as any player in his first year of Test cricket would. Does he get back in this team? Is he still wanted, still important?
In his absence, Wood took three wickets in Port Elizabeth, nine wickets in Johannesburg — and was also voted player of the match. While the pair would almost certainly have played together, elbow permitting, Archer is understandably apprehensive.
'Joe Root came up to me after and said because the decision was taken out of my hands I shouldn't think I'm not an asset for the team,' he says, smiling at the memory. 'That reassurance has been really good, especially coming from the captain. You don't have to put yourself under pressure, you don't have to be fit even before your body is fit.
'The last thing you need is to come rushing back and suffer a setback that keeps you out longer. It's not difficult for me, it's just different. It's not hard, but it's competitive. That's why I get upset when I'm not playing because if someone has a good game you automatically think they are going to stick with that player. That's why what Joe Root said was good.
'Looking back, I don't think it would have been the best move to play, for myself or the team. As the game has gone on, I've seen the number of overs the boys have bowled. It was the right decision.
'Now we go to Sri Lanka, and it might be a repeat of the pitches in New Zealand. If the elbow isn't good enough, I can't see them sending me to Sri Lanka. We've got a long summer of cricket coming up. We've got a Twenty20 World Cup and the physios will have a plan for my wellbeing.'
It's almost as if he's turning it all over in his mind as he speaks. At one moment desperate to just get out and play, at another realistic that the wickets in Sri Lanka are slow death to a bowler with his skillset. New Zealand must have felt like torture, too, particularly at Mount Maunganui, where Root bowled Archer for 42 overs as the hosts amassed 615 for nine. This, and other vignettes — a slower pace at a very chilly Old Trafford during the Ashes — have given rise to the notion that Archer does not care for Test cricket.
It is the first question Pietersen said he would ask him: does he want to even play the long-form game? Archer is adamant.
'Do I want to play Test cricket?' he queries. 'Yeah, yeah. I've got a few milestones I'd like to achieve — so I very much want to play Test cricket. It's not true that modern cricketers only want to be white-ball cricketers. Because I had a good World Cup that doesn't mean I only like World Cup cricket.
'I've played seven Test matches and got three five-wicket hauls. Even in the ones when I didn't take five, I took two or three. I'm pretty all right at Test cricket.
'It's a bit early to try to cement one form for me. Test cricket is fun. It's everything I imagined it would be — probably a few more five-day games than I hoped. All in all, it's gone really well. The last 18 months I wouldn't change for the world. For me, though, when I play a Test match, I want to get out there, bowl and get off the field as soon as possible.
'I don't like watching people scoring hundreds [the innings against New Zealand contained a double hundred for BJ Watling and 126 from Mitchell Santner]. The momentum, the intensity, goes up and down, and there are sessions when you feel the game isn't going anywhere. It's not always enjoyable. Sometimes you just have to contain, but then you've got five days and suddenly you can be going through a team.
'Then it's like it's on fast forward. That's the best thing about Test cricket. In a one-day game you don't get a chance to come back. If you start badly, you'll lose. In a Test match, certainly a Test series, you can return. We had everything thrown at us in South Africa, sickness, injury, we lost the first Test and then we came out victorious.'
So we look for clues about the origin of this rumoured aversion. I say that because Chris Gayle has been the best of West Indies cricket for more than a decade, and he seems to prefer white ball, perhaps there is now a general belief that all Caribbean-born cricketers feel the same.
'But I don't think Chris Gayle has even retired from Test cricket!' Archer counters. [This is true, but he also hasn't played it since September 2014, against Bangladesh.] 'That's a bad stereotype to think that anyone who comes from the Caribbean is going to be all about white-ball cricket.
'They say we only care about the money as well, and that's totally not the case. Chris Gayle's average in Test cricket is over 40.'
So what, then, of Pietersen's comments about England losing Archer from Tests, and more? 'I wasn't aware of what he said until the day Stuart Broad was doing an interview and he asked if there were any thoughts of mine I'd like him to project,' Archer adds. 'I didn't know what he was talking about. He explained Kevin had done an interview and Broad said if there was anything I didn't feel comfortable with, he could say a few things for me.
'So I looked at the interview and I didn't really agree with it. I'm very happy, you know. The captain makes me feel welcome, the team make me feel welcome — the media aren't always 100 per cent correct, and I don't read much social media because one day you're a s*** player and one good game and everyone is on your bandwagon. You can't please anyone sometimes.'
Archer feigns nonchalance but there are times when it is obvious social media bothers him. Lurking online are probably his harshest critics, those who dismiss his injuries, question his commitment, damn him for letting his speed drop. And like a lot of young people, he can't always look away.
'People don't care if you're sick, if you're injured, if you're battling something emotionally, they'll still have their opinion and there's nothing you can do,' Archer says.
'I try not to read anything but I can't always help seeing what is being said, everyone talking about how I play my game. It's a bit shocking really — because I'm a little bit different to other players, people aren't happy.
'I can't care what they think, though. People don't understand at all about fast bowling. I've never seen anyone who has played professional sport have a go at me. People who have been in that position have an idea of what you go through. You turn up, you're not going to get the same feel at a ground every day. It will not always be the same. You're only human — and there's stuff you're going to go through that's different.
'If you had to bowl 90mph every ball. you wouldn't play a whole season. Half, maybe, if you're lucky. Not all. Even Nortje in Johannesburg went through some spells where he wasn't 100 per cent and it just goes to show, you've got to know your body, you've got to know what you can give, you've got to know that you're good enough to be here in the first place, so you don't worry about what goes on off the field.
'I always try to bowl full intensity, but if you're tired your full intensity won't be 90mph. Day four, day five, when you've already bowled 30 overs in a game — that's understandable, surely?'
Indeed it is. And maybe that is what Archer needs most of all: understanding. It's certainly something Pietersen could relate to, as well: it's not easy being him.
, I’ve bowled fast for 18 years I know how the body feels when u bowl so many overs in one game then quick turn around 2nd Test then bowling back to back days ����*
. He is British, that's like saying you're from Karachi not America.
