The players’ retention/release list ahead of the upcoming Indian Premier League (IPL) 2022 was submitted by all 10 franchises earlier this week. While the teams retained some obvious picks, there were a few surprising names too in the release list that featured 85 players in total.
One of the interesting names in the retained group was England pacer Jofra Archer, who has been out of action since July 2021. The right-arm pacer didn’t play a single game in the last season of the cash-rich league, but Mumbai Indians (MI), who took a flyer on Archer by picking him in the last auction, retained the Barbados cricketer with the hope that he would be ready for the next IPL season.
The gamble of Mumbai could well be paying off as, according to a report, Archer has already started bowling and would be fully ready by March, when the lucrative league is scheduled to begin.
“He is currently in the UAE with the England Lions team and is continuing his rehab. He is making excellent progress, and the view is that he will be looking to play competitively again during the early part of 2023,” a spokesman for the England Wales Cricket Board (ECB) informed Cricbuzz.
Notably, Archer was originally out of action due to an elbow injury which had been troubling him for a long time, but a stress fracture ruled him out of playing any sort of competitive cricket for the entire 2022.
Despite knowing Archer’s unavailability, the Mumbai-based franchise took a chance on him and invested INR 8 crore in the last auction, hoping that the speedster would form a deadly combination with frontline pacer Jasprit Bumrah but sadly for MI fans, that didn’t happen. Currently, both Bumrah and Archer are out of action, but fans would expect them to be ready and play together in the forthcoming season for the five-time champions.
