England men’s cricket’s managing director Robert Key recently shared that he had advised Jofra Archer to skip the IPL to play County Championship matches before the Test season. However, he also said that he didn’t mind Archer playing in the IPL to get some overs under his belt as well. While Archer was initially not part of the auction but entered later, Rajasthan Royals secured his services for a massive amount of ₹12.50 crore as well.

Speaking to Wisden Cricket Weekly’s Patreon channel, Key said, “Jofra is always brilliant to deal with,” he said. “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. 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.”

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“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. 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,” he added.

While Key said that Jofra Archer has the potential to be one of England’s best ever, he said that he needs to sustain his fitness for longer periods of time as well.

“The plan is that he’ll be ready to play. He was only ever going to play one or two Tests this summer, probably – at a push, three. He’s also got to get in the team now. I think he could be one of the best bowlers we’ve had, but he’s got to find form. He’s got to be able to show that he can sustain it through a whole four-day game,” Robert Key concluded.