Jofra Archer reportedly took part in a Barbados Cricket Association’s second tier match for his old school team without informing the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB).
Archer is a centrally-contracted player with the ECB.
“I’m not aware of that. I’ll find out,” England team’s managing director said of Archer’s participation in the three-day fixture last weekend.
Playing for Chris Church Foundation against Lords, Archer took 4/18 and scored 11 runs on Sunday. The contest will resume next weekend after being paused for the working week.
However, Archer will take no further part in the contest after returning to UK on Sunday night itself from Barbados.
The right-arm fast bowler has been troubled by stress fracture of the back and elbow injury for a couple of years now but he recently trained with the touring England squad in Barbados.
“Jofra was bowling out here,” Key said. “As you often see with Jofra, he rocks up and you think ‘what’s going to happen here?’, and he ends up bowling 95 miles an hour and he looks like he’s an absolute genius. But we’re just going to take it slow with him. We don’t want to put any sort of deadlines on him. That’s what we’ve done in the past, we’re trying to learn from what we’ve done in the past with Jofra.”
“Now we’re taking control of him coming back. We’re not going to say you need to get back for this part here. From what they’ve said, an elbow injury is a complicated place to have an injury. So we just want to take this as slow as possible,” he added.
Key revealed Archer wanted to take part in the next year’s IPL but the ECB asked him to instead focus on recovery.
“Jofra was keen to go into the IPL auction but we just feel like, actually, the best way to do this now is just for us to be in control of it. There’s no commitment either way, and we can then just bring you back,” he said.
“If it takes an extra couple of months, but he gets another couple of years out of his career, and gets back fully… I think he’s worth his weight in gold,” he added.
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