This season, in an attempt to distract everyone from the fact that its main sponsors are one of the world’s largest steel companies and the literal state of Saudi Arabia, the Tata Indian Premier League has been planting trees for every dot ball bowled during the tournament. At the post‑match presentation, the bowler who delivered the most dot balls in the game is awarded a ceremonial sapling. Which means that on four occasions this season – the most of any player – Jofra Archer has been contractually obliged to receive a small tree on live television.
The first time Archer gets his sapling, he eyes it with the kind of narrow-eyed suspicion any of us might exhibit. By the time he gets his fourth sapling – 10 dot balls against Delhi Capitals, 180 trees planted – he’s basically a pro at this. Shake hands. Look straight into the camera. Gaze at the sapling tenderly, as if he’s going to plant it himself, in his own garden, sheltered and watered, and definitely not throwing it straight into the first bin he finds.
And in a way, Archer’s growing collection of saplings represents perhaps the only material reward for what has been a largely thankless season of toil for Rajasthan Royals. Second bottom of the IPL table, any prospect of the playoffs fast receding into the distance. For the Royals this has been a chastening 2025, a fiesta of dropped catches, botched chases and weird selection decisions. Still: 234 trees for 13 dot balls against Chennai, 252 trees for 14 dot balls against Punjab Kings. Perhaps, amid all the carnage and human wastage, something good can come of all this.
And for those of you not overly invested in the fortunes of Rajasthan Royals, this has been a cautiously encouraging few weeks for Archer connoisseurs. It began in inauspicious circumstances, with a spell of four overs for 76 against Sunrisers Hyderabad last month, the most expensive analysis in IPL history.
But more recently the form and the swagger has returned. The dot balls and the saplings have been accumulating. Against Gujurat Titans, Archer produced a delivery clocked at 95mph and then cleaned up Shubman Gill with a vicious inswinger. Last week, against Royal Challengers Bangalore, he smashed Jitesh Sharma in the helmet and then got Virat Kohli out for the first time in his career. There’s a series against India this summer and then a winter tour of Australia to follow. Can we officially get excited yet?
Short answer: probably not. Two-over spells in the IPL are a poor indication of how Archer’s body will hold up over two days on a Lord’s featherbed or at the Optus Stadium in Perth. The smart, numbers-guided play is to entrust the Ashes tour to the existing battery of pace bowlers – Chris Woakes, Matt Potts, Brydon Carse, Gus Atkinson, Josh Tongue, Olly Stone, Sonny Baker, Josh Hull – and keep one of England’s greatest white-ball bowlers fresh for white-ball cricket.
And yet it is the very essence of Jofra-love, almost the very point of the exercise, to get excited on the flimsiest of evidence. Since he burst into international cricket in 2019, this is a cricketer who has not shrunk from but leant into the outsized expectations that pursued him. This is a cricketer who inspires visions and delusions, who dares you to dream, whose very fragility also presents as a rapidly vanishing window, a reminder to seize the moment when it arises.
Certainly this would explain in retrospect the eagerness of England’s management to milk this shiny new toy for all it was worth. Archer bowled more overs than any other England player in 2019, was flogged and exhorted like few players before him. “We want every ball to be an effort ball,” his coach Chris Silverwood urged. “There are certain spells where he can just unleash a little bit more,” his captain Joe Root exhorted.
And over time, as the injuries piled up, as the surgeries and stress fractures began to accumulate, the narrative of Archer being flogged to decrepitude by England’s ham-fisted management took hold to the point where it has basically become orthodoxy. Around the same time a parallel narrative seemed to emerge where Archer was somehow taking the England and Wales Board for a ride, cushioning himself against that generous central contract while preserving himself for the lucrative franchise gigs that would secure his financial independence.
None of which really stands up to the merest scrutiny. Archer didn’t play a single IPL game between 2020 and 2023, a period in which he turned out 15 times for England and once for the Sussex Second XI, so those people can basically shut up. And to watch him during the IPL this season is to acquaint oneself with a very different cricketer to the one so demonised by beige England fans over recent years, a cricketer who has consistently chosen the hard yards over the easy road.
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For example, Archer has taken nine wickets in the competition this season, averaging 36 and going at almost 10 an over. But almost exclusively he has been bowling in the powerplay and at the death, the hardest overs in the game, with minimal protection. He has been carrying a subpar attack on his back. Along the way, some of the wickets he has taken: Rachin Ravindra, Shreyas Iyer, Gill, KL Rahul, Mitchell Marsh, Kohli. He has induced a higher false-shot percentage than any other powerplay bowler this tournament. Judging from his seam position and the way he manages to take the ball away from the left-hander, his skill and technique is as good as it ever was.
And yet, even by going into the IPL auction Archer attracted a certain criticism, by the rules of modern cricket discourse in which everything must be placed in opposition to something else. Dom Sibley’s careful 64 off 481 balls for Surrey is in fact a form of one-man protest against the instant gratification of franchise cricket. Pat Cummins playing Major League Cricket instead of the Hundred is the first shot in the Ashes war. The IPL robot dog is a calculated rebuke to the Vitality dachshund. And so on.
But perhaps, as Archer tears in for his franchise, it is possible to envisage a scenario in which these two worlds combine. He’s just turned 30. He’s honing his skills and developing his resilience ahead of a tough summer. He’s bowling against world-class batters, devising solutions on the hoof, getting into a rhythm.
To grow a tree, it is not sufficient simply to plant a sapling. The seedlings need to be right for the soil and the terrain. You need equipment. You need luck. You need people to nurture and nourish them over years and years. It’s a ridiculously against-the-odds endeavour. But I want to believe it’s still possible.