Will Archer 2.0 still be a £100m cheat code on England Test return?

Saqib Mahmood is one of Jofra Archer's closest friends in cricket.

"With Jof the easiest thing for him to have done is just gone purely white ball," Mahmood tells BBC Sport.

"He'd have been financially better off and had all of that. But I could always tell he wanted to play Test cricket. I just knew it."

Mahmood could be proven right next week after Archer was called into England's squad for the second Test against India. After an injury-ravaged four and a half years, Archer is back on cricket's biggest stage.

It has been a story of cruel blows, hard work and false starts and one that results in the most intriguing question of all. Just what can be expected of Archer the Test bowler in 2025?

'Like a £100m signing – a cheat code'

With the passing of time, it is easy to forget just how good Jofra Archer was in his first international summer in 2019.

A World Cup winner and an Ashes weapon, he seemingly had it all.

Aged just 24, he was bowling knuckle balls in a super over to win a 50-over World Cup against New Zealand, delivering one of the great spells of fast bowling to Steve Smith against Australia on Test debut and swinging it around corners at Headingley to take six wickets and make Ben Stokes' miracle possible.

He took 22 wickets in four matches in that Ashes series. By his seventh Test he had taken three five-wicket hauls - as many as Andrew Flintoff managed in his entire Test career.

"It was like what it must feel like in football for guys to go and spend £100m on a player and bosh you've got him straight up," England team-mate Chris Woakes recalls.

Australia batter Smith had to retire hurt after being hit by an Archer bouncer

"What was quite nice is other teams didn't know what he was capable of because they hadn't seen him.

"It felt like a bit of a cheat code. As soon as I saw him bowl I thought he was going to dominate international cricket because he is a serious talent, especially for such a young guy."

But if Archer's first summer was the debut album that went platinum, the following winter was the difficult second album.

Only two wickets came across two Tests in a series defeat in New Zealand.

After he bowled 42 overs in one innings of the first Test, captain Joe Root said he had to learn "every spell counts".

"You really have got to run in and use that extra pace to your advantage," Root said.

England had a new toy but were reading from the wrong instruction manual.

An injury 'burden'

Next came the injuries which have dogged the career of England's most exciting bowler for a generation, plus a cut hand cleaning a fish tank and a breach of the Covid-19 bubble after an unauthorised trip home.

Soreness in Archer's right elbow on the tour of South Africa was revealed to be a stress fracture in early 2020.

He came back that summer and battled through the winter but the third match of series in India in February 2021 remains his most recent Test.

Archer underwent surgery on the elbow that May, did so again the following December when the issue was not resolved and then sustained a stress fracture in his back in 2022.

When the elbow issue returned again in 2023, Archer's career at the most ominous of crossroads.

"I remember the 2022 T20 World Cup [which England won in Australia] me and Jof were both in Dubai in a hotel watching the final," says Mahmood, who was also out injured at that time.

"We were both a bit like 'we would love to be there'.

"When you watched the boys win a final and all of that, you don't have to say anything, but you just know, from each other's faces."

Archer has said he felt like a "burden" during the absence.

"I've seen a few comments, people saying 'he's on the longest paid holiday I've ever seen'," said Archer.

"You try to not let it get to you but you can ignore 100 of them but sometimes that 101st is the straw that breaks the camel's back."

'Criticism gives him another gear' – the long road back

The result was months of rehab, completed at Sussex but mostly back home in Barbados.

His family, dogs and two parrots - Jessie and James, named after Pokemon characters - live just 150m or so from the idyllic Windward Cricket Club.

Archer would be seen in the nets there, or at the island's famous Test ground the Kensington Oval. On occasions, Mahmood flew out to train with his England team-mate while both were coming back from similar injuries.

"He might not be vocal about it or he might not give off that impression, but Jof has very high standards," Mahmood says.

"We had net batters who used to come in and one brought a tripod to set his camera up.

"We were a bit like 'you what' and I could just see Jof as well. He just cranked it up straight away. As soon as you give him a sniff of letting him do something, he does it."

England's management hinted at regrets in initial attempts to rush Archer back and have since developed carefully-laid plan, the work of England's elite pace bowling coach Neil Killeen.

Archer has had a PDF mapping out every match he would play up until his Test return this summer - and an Ashes winter beyond. He has hit the vast majority to this point.

Albeit playing only white-ball cricket, neither back nor elbow have troubled Archer since he returned at the T20 World Cup last year. At that tournament no-one took more wickets for England in their run to the semi-finals, while a hostile spell at Lord's against Australia in a one-day international in September suggested the magic was still there.

That is not to say it has been a serene return. There have been poor days and, with expectations still remarkably high, criticism too.

"People are just very quick to judge and they just go from one extreme to the other with Jof and I think that's purely because they know how good he is at his best," Mahmood says.

"He'll run in and he'll bowl 150kph and if he goes for runs, people will look at the runs and if he runs in and bowls mid-135s people will talk about his speed not necessarily his figures.

"It definitely drives him.

"He's the kind of guy, even for me, I won't joke around with.

"We always have a bit of a laugh, about each others' calves and all of that, and then it just ends when he says 'what's your fastest ball?' and then there's no comeback from that."

Archer and Mahmood shared a flat together in Barbados while doing their rehabilitation

Some of the loudest criticism came in April this year when Archer bowled the most expensive spell in Indian Premier League history – four wicketless overs for 76 runs.

His bowling coach at Rajasthan Royals was the former New Zealand bowler Shane Bond - another who knows a thing or two about trying to come back after serious injuries.

"For anyone who has a day like that, it hurts," Bond says.

"There's no doubt he was hurting a bit. I had those days myself and your ego takes a bit of a hit.

"I think that's a credit to how quickly he bounced back. He was hurt but brushed it off and then just got back to it. He got back to the training ground, trained brilliantly, was really focused and knew what he wanted to do and had to do."

Archer finished the IPL as the Royals joint-highest wicket-taker.

If you exclude that afternoon on a flat pitch in Hyderabad, his economy throughout the rest of the tournament would have ranked among the best for pace bowlers in the competition…

'He still has an aura' – how good can Archer 2.0 be in Tests?

The unknown question now is what sort of red-ball bowler can Archer be. Is he the same electric seamer that stepped out at Lord's in whites in 2019?

"That pace and that hostility that he has are all still there," Bond says.

"You always lose probably a couple of kph at the top end when you've gone through that back surgery, but he is certainly fast enough to cause problems."

Predicting red-ball form from white-ball results is notoriously difficult, some might say futile.

Archer's pace drops across his spells in one-day international cricket – interestingly not as significantly as it did before – but part of that is due to him bowling an increased number of slower balls at the death.

Perhaps more significantly, Archer bowls almost half as many outswingers in ODIs since his latest comeback than he did in 2019 – a delivery which is crucial in a fast bowler's armoury.

Some counter that by saying Archer was never an outswing bowler. Another point made is that it is simply a result of his diet of white-ball cricket, where a pace bowler tries to give a right-hander as little width as possible.

"He starts just outside the stumps and it swings back in," Bond says.

"He certainly has the ability to turn his wrist around and swing the ball out, but I don't think you're gonna get a big banana outswinger.

"People get carried away with trying to swing it both ways like Jimmy Anderson, who was just a legend. But as long as he can move the ball, that's the critical thing."

Bond points to Archer's spells with the new ball in the IPL as the biggest tell for Archer's red-ball future. There he would attack the top of off stump with pace and nip while putting the variations on the back burner, as he would with the red ball.

"That's where he's extremely dangerous because he does swing the ball," Bond says. "He gets bounce and even in the IPL and on good wickets, he was generally knocking over good players and causing problems.

"That's the sort of player you're looking for in red-ball cricket.

"He also has that psychological impact because people know what he is capable of.

"Jofra has that sort of aura about him. When he gets it right there's something just unique about the way he does things."

But the biggest unknown remains whether Archer's body can withhold the strain of cricket's longest format.

Australia captain Pat Cummins made his Test debut as an 18-year-old but did not play again for five years because of a series of injuries, including back stress fractures. He has gone on to become one of the all-time greats in the second part of his career.

Bond, though, managed only eight more Tests after his back was fused with titanium wire in a bid to fix the issues in 2003.

"The biggest thing is the worry factor," Bond says.

"He's had the combination of back and elbow, so the biggest risk for both is that the increase in load and intensity and for both of those areas.

"I can't speak for Jof but for me that never went away with my back. For the rest of my career when I bowled I always worried that it might go ping because you knew the repercussions if it did."

Archer's preparations for a Test return began in earnest after returning to Sussex after this year's IPL.

Initially bowling with a guard on his thumb to protect an injury that ruled him out of the white-ball series against West Indies, Archer began with one spell per day followed by a rest, then two spells and eventually bowling on back-to-back days in the nets, largely to Sussex bowling coach James Kirtley.

Then, on 22 June, came the moment Archer had been waiting for – his first first-class match for 1,500 days.

Playing for Sussex against Durham he took 1-32 across 18 overs – the most he had bowled in a match for more than four years.

Afterwards Archer described the day he returned with the ball as "the longest" he has ever had, but seemed to be referring to the lifeless Chester-le-Street pitch rather than the tiredness in his legs.

"He threatened the right-handers outside edge," former England bowler Steven Finn says.

"Everything wasn't coming in as maybe we saw in the white-ball cricket.

"What I saw was the ball holding its line to right-handed batters, which is a really positive sign to see his wrist right behind the ball.

"It wouldn't be possible for that to happen if it wasn't."

That England have opted to recall Archer after only one innings – Sussex did not bowl in the second innings of the Durham draw – shows how highly they rate him.

"I just think he's one of those bowlers, and there's not many, who you get generally excited about watching," Bond says.

"Whether it be [India bowler Jasprit] Bumrah or Jofra, there's a level of excitement because they just make it look easy."

He adds: "Just temper the expectations.

"I still think it's going to be exciting to watch him bowl and I still think he'll do something awesome but just realise that it's never easy coming back from an injury like that.

"He's just expected to blow teams apart and he could. But it's just nice to be great to see him back in the whites."