Half-two in the afternoon and it’s slow going at the bars, stalls and stands around the Nursery Ground. The waitresses are chopping lemons and wiping down the counters, one of the two men in the ice-cream truck is having a breather in the front seat and the other is staring out his window into the middle distance.
The next drink can wait, so can that trip to the toilets brought on by the last one. Everyone’s attention is fixed on one thing. It has been four years, four months and 17 days, since anyone has seen Jofra Archer bowl in a Test match. Five, 10 and 24 since his memorable debut against Australia at Lord’s.
Archer has been English cricket’s great what-might-have-been. Now he was finally back bowling in a Test match, ready for his second act, and at the ground where he made his name back in 2019 with one of the most famous spells in Ashes cricket. The large part of his achievements in this form of the sport all took place in that one summer. Nothing he has done since, in the handful of Tests he has played afterwards, the scattering of one-day, T20 or IPL games he has appeared in, has come close to it.
Archer at the end of his run is one of the great sights of English sport. Even when he is standing still, idly tossing the ball from one hand to the other, the atmosphere around him is alive with anticipation of the movements he is about to make, the latent threat of his pace, and the ever-present possibility of imminent violence.
Ben Stokes is a cricketer who makes things happen. Archer is a cricketer who makes you believe they are about to. Yashasvi Jaiswal was on strike. They are teammates in the IPL and Archer seemed to have a clear idea of how he wanted to bowl to him.
His first ball was good. His second was better. His third was the best of all. It left his hand at 90mph, with a seam that cleaved the air, landed on leg stump and jagged off the pitch, flicked the edge of Jaiswal’s bat and flew through to second slip, where it was caught by Harry Brook. Archer was off and running before the catch was landed, he went full pelt towards square-leg and sprinted smack bang into the arms of the first teammate he came to. It ended up being Shoaib Bashir, who was playing for Surrey’s Under-18s the last time Archer bowled in Test match cricket.
Soon enough everyone else had joined the two of them in the huddle. From the middle of it all Archer broke off to reach one arm over the head of his teammates and point towards the England changing room balcony, in acknowledgment of all the backroom staff who have supported him during the years in between, when he has had three separate stress fractures in his right shoulder, a stress fracture in his lower back and injuries to the ligaments in his right hand. He makes bowling fast look so easy, but it has been brutally hard on him.
The celebration seemed to be an expression of his relief. He had spent more than four years working for a 43rd Test wicket. No doubt there have been plenty of moments along the way when he must have wondered if he would play Test cricket again. No doubt there have been moments, too, when he must have wondered whether he even wanted to. Here was his answer.
His next delivery was even quicker, a 93mph that rocked Karun Nair backwards on to his heels as it whizzed through the space where his head had been a split-second earlier. It was the fastest over anyone has bowled in this series.
“To bowl quick,” wrote Frank Tyson, who is one of the few men who has known what it is to bowl at Archer’s pace, “is to revel in the glad animal action; to thrill in physical prowess and to enjoy a certain sneaking feeling of superiority over the other mortals who play the game.”
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You can see a similar thing in the way Archer grins at the batsman. The team, too, seemed to be lifted by knowing that for once in this series the most hostile bowler on either side was playing for them. They have been outmatched for long stretches when they have been up against the world’s best fast bowler.
All of a sudden Chris Woakes, who had conceded 13 runs in his first over, seemed to be making the ball whip and zip off the pitch, and he beat Nair’s outside edge twice in the next over, as the batsman struggled to readjust to a very different sort of problems Woakes posed.
It got harder. Of course it did. The pitch was dead, the ball was soft and the day was hot. Archer ran through second, and third, spells from the Pavilion and Nursery Ends without getting a sniff of another wicket, a reminder, if anyone needed it, that he is not going to fix Test cricket for England all by himself.
But you guess that he can stand to wait another day for his next victim after spending so long on his last one.