England men's managing director Rob Key has admitted that Jofra Archer's decision to feature in the 18th edition of the Indian Premier League (IPL) will put him "a couple of months behind" schedule in his attempt to make a red-ball return.
Key also revealed that the ECB wanted Archer to skip the upcoming edition of the cash-rich T20 league and focus on his red-ball return, however, a change in the rules of the IPL made things difficult for Archer.
Archer was bought by Rajasthan Royals at the recently concluded IPL auction for Rs 12.5 crore after a bidding war with Mumbai Indians.
"Jofra is always brilliant to deal with," Key said, in an interview on Wisden Cricket Weekly's Patreon channel. "We were like, 'The best thing might be to miss the IPL this year and get yourself ready, and we'll start building your loads up… if you can get through a bit of Championship cricket, and then you can start the Test summer. He was happy with that.
Notably, the IPL governing council has introduced a new policy which states that "Any [overseas] player who registers for [an] auction and, after getting picked at the auction, makes himself unavailable before the start of the season will get banned from participating in the IPL/IPL auction for two seasons." As per the governing council, the only exception will be for "an injury/medical condition, which will have to be confirmed by the [player's] home board".
Therefore, since Archer was fit and playing for England in the T20Is, he couldn't have withdrawn from the auction this year, citing injury management.
"But we had to look and see what India were going to do with [the IPL's rules]. We thought that we could make the case that he's still in part of a managed workload period. The problem with that was he was then bowling with two slips and a gully and bowling 90mph in the T20s in the West Indies, so it's hard to make the case that he's injured when he's bowling like that," Key added.
"They [the BCCI] came back after a bit of back-and-forth and said, 'Well no, he won't be allowed to go into this year, next year from then on. So then you start thinking that could be about $4 million that he loses out on there, and I don't then feel… then it's on him, really. You say, 'Jof, what do you want to do? This is your career, your life. You'll still be able to play Test cricket.'
"We believe there's a lot of water to go under the bridge for that, but we still think he'll be alright. We'll just be a couple of months behind… So then Jofra decided that he felt the best thing for him was to go into the IPL [auction], which we had no issue with, and then do that loading throughout the IPL and get himself ready for the Test series that way."
