English planning to juggle pacemen

CHRIS Silverwood admits England’s coaching staff must be “smart” with how they handle the likes of Jofra Archer so they have a coterie of fast bowlers capable of matching Australia’s firepower in the next Ashes.

The news Archer faces around three months on the sidelines with a low-grade stress fracture of his right elbow, an injury that first surfaced at the World Cup last summer, has raised questions about his workload.

Archer bowled more overs in 2019 than any of his England teammates, despite only making his international debut in May, though Silverwood insists he would not have handled the 24-year-old differently, even with the benefit of hindsight.

But the England head coach knows they will have to fight fire with fire on bouncy Australian surfaces in 2021-22 and having express pacemen such as Archer, Mark Wood and Olly Stone could be gold dust.

Silverwood envisages being able to alternate between any three speedsters to keep them in prime physical condition.

Of the aforementioned trio only Wood is fully fit, with Stone recovering from a stress fracture of the lower back.

“The life of a fast bowler is hard. Injuries are going to happen. You won’t stop that,” Silverwood said.

“But the international calendar is now absolutely crampacked so, to talk about smart cricket, from a managerial point of view we’ve got to be smart with how we handle our assets too.

“My dream, my ideal is to have three fast bowlers fit at any given point so we can rotate them, so they’re not always playing, and at any given point I’ve got one sat with his feet up full of energy, waiting to go. If I have three of them fit there [Ashes], whether it is those three or not, then it would be a great advantage for us.”