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HEAD coach Chris Silverwood says senior citizens Jimmy Anderson and Stuart Broad are turning into gurus for England’s fast bowling young guns.
With an Ashes series just 15 months away, Silverwood is keen to keep Jofra Archer and Mark Wood’s express pace at the forefront of his planning to take on the Aussies in their back yard.
But England’s Peter Pan newball twins show few signs of fading gently into the sunset.
Anderson, 38, and 34-year-old Broad shared seven wickets, and took their combined aggregate to 1,104 in Tests, in the soggy anticlimax against Pakistan at the Ageas Bowl last week.
And they are likely to be retained for the third Test starting at the same venue tomorrow – meaning 96mph Archer or 95.7mph Wood is likely to sit out the decider with England leading the series 1-0.
Silverwood has not written off the possibility that Broad, Anderson, Archer and Wood could yet feature in a fourpronged attack to prove there is no pace like home.
Silverwood said of his two old stagers: “They have proven they are very good bowlers again, haven’t they? It’s great for us – having their experience around for the other guys to work alongside is superb.
“They pass on so much knowledge to these lads.
You have your bowling coaches, but having those two is like having two more.
“What I’m trying to do is build an attack that has experience and everything else in there – pace, swing, movement – so we’re covering as many departments as we can.
“I don’t want to predict anything – I want to keep all my options open. “Let’s just keep building that group of bowlers and see where we get to.You look at what you need for the here and now and you look down the line for what we potentially need. “There’s various factors we look at and pace is one of them – pace, movement, bounce, left or right arm
– all these things come into account.”
Archer has struggled to send the speed gun into meltdown like the rapid spell that poleaxed Aussie run-machine Steve Smith at Lord’s last summer.
There is no suggestion that he is troubled by his old elbow injury, and Silverwood observed: “He’s not complained of it recently.
“I’d hope he would come and tell me if that was the case. “But Jofra firing at that sort of pace is very exciting – all of us watched those spells last year and went, ‘Wow’.
“It’s difficult to bowl that pace all the time, it’s hard to operate those high ends in every spell. He’s still very young in his Test career and expectations have got to match where he is in his circle of learning. “But if there’s an opportunity to blow an end up and open the door for us, to step on the gas a little bit, these are the talks I’ve had with Jofra.”