Archer is an outsider in so many ways in the narrow parish of elite English cricket. It isn’t simply the fact he grew up in Barbados, or is a rare black male cricketer to earn a full ECB contract. It’s also the fact he’s from another place as a sportsman, talked about as though he’s some bright-eyed creature found shivering in the treeline, the guy who wears his jumper around his waist, who doesn’t carry the familiar signifiers of this sealed sporting-industrial life.
Statements such as these should be seen in the context of both these layers of otherness: “He needs to ramp it up more ... The energy and effort have to be there all the time.” “We want every ball to be an effort ball.” “Your body hurts at times ... You’ve just got to choose to do it, really.” “Culturally he is different.”
The words, there, of England’s captain, head coach and director of cricket at various times this winter. Speaking, to be clear, about a bloke bowling through a stress fracture, while leading England’s attack in his first season of international cricket. All of these quotes are set in the middle of warm words about Archer’s performances, all couched with sympathetic talk about how much he is putting in.
Plus we’ve had the standard klaxon-parping talk about body language, about unacceptable diet, about the need to really “bust a gut” in training. Nobody else gets this stuff. Nobody mentions Stuart Broad’s up-and-down intensity levels, the sense of a bowler (successfully and correctly) looking after himself. Nobody urges Joe Root himself to put “more effort” in or talks about mental fragility when he keeps getting out just past 50. Why not?
www.theguardian.com
