Rajasthan Royals, the IPL franchise are still hopeful of getting the service of speedster Jofra Archer in some of the matches, despite his stress fracture on right elbow. He had not played in the last three Tests against South Africa. Even, the ECB also announced on Thursday that he would not feature in the two-Test tour of Sri Lanka as well as entire IPL season. However, another scan will take place in a month and Royals’ head coach wants to wait for that.
“It is a blow but these things always confront teams,” McDonald told ESPNcricinfo. “These are the setbacks that you have to contend with. First and foremost, our thoughts are with Jofra. Getting an elbow injury when you are at the top of your game is far from ideal, but watching him from afar it’s been great to see what he’s been able to achieve this year.”
“We’ll see what happens,” he further added. “The ECB have been reasonably solid on ruling him out of the IPL, but we still hold out some hope that he may recover. We’ll get those details over the next 24-48 hours as to the extent of the injury, and we’ll work with the ECB as to what that may or may not look like.”
“I’m sure he’s keen [to play in the IPL]. He loves playing for Rajasthan, but injuries happen, and until more details come to light, we will always hold out hope for a player of that quality. It doesn’t look good at the moment, but we won’t be in any rush to replace him at this moment in time,” he shared.
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Whether Jofra Archer will get fit in time or not, McDonald said they have a backup who can do well without Archer.
“We’ll work out ways to cover off his absence,” he said. “There’s no rush to sign a replacement unless other teams have injuries and are fighting for the same players. And we might not even be looking for a like-for-like either, because we feel like we’ve got some depth there in the bowling category.
“There aren’t too many Jofra Archers out there but, off the back of the auction, we’ve been able on build a pretty flexible and adaptable squad,” he concluded.