One feels for David Willey, omitted at the last moment from England’s World Cup squad and replaced by flavour-of-the month Jofra Archer, only just qualified to play for England. Willey has been a regular member of England’s ODI teams for three or four years now, and has done pretty well, not perhaps brilliantly, but then few bowlers return remarkable figures in the batsmen-dominated 50-overs game. Nevertheless, Willey had taken his fair share of wickets, and, if they have cost him 36 runs each, this is partly because he has often been used to bowl in the last overs of an innings when batsmen are hitting out at everything. He himself is a more than useful hitter and a brilliant fielder.
Archer bowls faster than Willey. He bowls faster than anyone else except perhaps Mark Wood, and he does this with a lovely easy action. The Sky commentators have got very excited about him and so has the former England captain Michael Vaughan. So, now that he is qualified, it’s no surprise that the national selector, Ed Smith, has waved him into the team and, in consequence, waved Willey out.
Fair enough if Archer is as good as we are told he is. After all, whatever one’s sympathy for Willey, he evidently hasn’t quite managed to make himself undroppable. That said, Archer hasn’t actually achieved anything much – except of course making a good impression. He played in three of the five ODIs against Pakistan, and took 3 wickets for 108 runs in 24 overs. Respectable, but no more than respectable. Nobody else would have been preferred to David Willey on the strength of these figures. He has been picked on promise rather than performance. The curious thing is that England have already been installed as favourites for this World Cup. Perhaps this has made them nervous, and influenced judgement.
I confess to a certain scepticism. This has nothing to do with Archer himself. I am sure he is as talented and engaging as his admirers say he is. But there are precedents for this sort of selection, and rather unhappy ones.
There is for instance the case of Sam Burgess. Remember him? He was the English Rugby League star playing very successfully in Australia. The word went that he was interested in switching to the 15-a-side game. The RFU bought out his contract. He joined Bath, where they couldn’t decide if he should play as a flanker or in the centre. Without much experience of the Union game, he was hustled into England’s squad for the 2015 World Cup which, like this cricket one, was being played in England.
Whatever his ability his presence seemed disruptive.
The very good team that Stuart Lancaster had been building since England’s unhappy RWC tournament in Australia in 2011 failed to do itself – or Lancaster – justice. England lost a match against Wales which they should have won and were then beaten by Australia, thus becoming the first host nation not to reach the quarter-final. Burgess exchanged the pedestal for the pillory, unfairly, for he hadn’t played that badly. The trouble was that he hadn’t played that well, and the high hopes invested in him had been dashed. One couldn’t avoid concluding that all the hype that had surrounded him had had an adverse effect on the other players, and that the team-spirit which Lancaster had inculcated had been corrupted.
It’s natural of course that coaches and selectors should be attracted by players who seem to offer something out of the ordinary. Even months before that 2015 WRC, when Sam Burgess was already being hailed at the Messiah – perhaps a better Biblical comparison would be as the Joshua who would lead the Children of Twickenham over Jordan and into the Promised Land – I found myself thinking of Brendan Laney.
Brendan Laney was a New Zealand wing or full-back who had been scoring lots of tries for the Highlanders in the Super12. He didn’t make the All Blacks, but he had a Scottish qualification and so he attracted the attention of the Scotland coach Ian McGeechan and the Director of Rugby Jim Telfer. He was brought over to Scotland, signed up for Edinburgh, but he would be capped for Scotland before he turned out for the club. Astonishingly he played for Scotland eleven days after stepping off the plane – even more astonishingly it was against the All Blacks. And still more astonishingly McGeechan had even wanted to pick him the previous Saturday against Argentina, till some of the senior players told him this really wouldn’t do.
There was a good deal of public criticism too, and though Laney would go on to play twenty times for Scotland, sometimes very well, and though he would play outstandingly for Edinburgh for three or four seasons, his international career never quite recovered from the circumstances of its beginning , or indeed from the hype that first surrounded him. It wasn’t his fault that he was put in a position in which so much was expected from him. Those who picked him so quickly without consideration of the circumstances were to blame.
I hope that Jofra Archer won’t turn out to be a Burgess or a Laney, but it’s almost always a great mistake to build up someone in advance of performance. Pedestals are for statues, not people, and should await death or at least retirement.