INTERVIEW: MUM IS MY INSPIRATION SAYS JOFRA
Thought YOU were nervous last Sunday? An enchanting interview with our World Cup star and the mother who inspired him to glory
THE whole world, it seems, watched him, and the hopes of the nation were pinned on him. Fast bowler Jofra Archer had been an England cricketer for just two months when he was called on to deliver for his country last Sunday, to win the World Cup.
And he did it with such elegance that it is hard to believe he was unknown — except to cricket aficionados — until his triumph.
Gliding up to the wicket, as cool as you like, the 24-year-old prepared to bowl the last ball in the Super Over — a tie-breaker so arcane and unfamiliar as to be unique in the history of the competition.
And now it would decide the victor. New Zealand needed two runs from the ball.
In the 30,000-strong crowd at Lord’s, Jofra’s mum Joelle Waithe — who had travelled 4,000 miles from the family home in Barbados to watch her only son — sat with her heart pounding as if it would break free from her chest. ‘The whole game was nail-biting, heart-throbbing,’ she tells me in an exclusive interview, a few days after the thrilling final. ‘The tension of the Super Over was almost unbearable.
‘After the third ball (which New Zealand batsman James Neesham hit for six) I stood up, raised my hands over my head and said, “Lord, we need a miracle”. There was nothing else to hold on to.’
And her son — and the Lord — delivered. ‘When England won, everyone was hugging. It was an out-of-body experience seeing the celebration, the lights, the fireworks. ‘I’m not a big hugger, but since I’ve been in England I’ve realised the English love to hug and kiss, so I’ve fallen into doing it,’ adds Joelle, 51. ‘I kissed the other players’ parents. They came over with their kids and friends and started to cry. But I didn’t. The tears never came.’
‘Maybe you hadn’t drunk enough water to cry,’ smiles Jofra. He is laconic, laid back; quietly self-possessed; his lean and muscular body as graceful as a big cat. When I ask how he kept his cool on a day of blistering heat and trip-wire tension, he is magnanimous.
‘Well, it wasn’t dependent on me,’ he says. ‘If it wasn’t for the other guys, we wouldn’t have won the game.
‘But it was a funny feeling having to bowl the Super Over. On the third ball, I thought New Zealand would win. But Eoin [Morgan, the England captain] had said when he asked me to do it, “It won’t be the end of the world if we lose. No one’s going to die”, and that was a big burden off my shoulders.
‘I always have the mentality: there will be more games if you lose. There will be a second chance, another opportunity to redeem yourself. But, of course, I went out and we won.’ He beams.
‘Everyone’s blood was pumping and there was a surge of adrenaline, and half-way through the over, with the crowd behind us, it was hard not to be emotionally involved.
‘There was half a tear in my eye when Jos [Buttler] removed the bails to signal that we’d won. Then everyone was running around, screaming and jumping.
‘ Everyone was hosed with champagne, then, after we left Lords, we went to our hotel and stayed up until 4 or 5 am. I didn’t get drunk. Nearly everyone did. But I’m not really a big drinker. I’m getting to be an Englishman, but not in that sense!’ he laughs.
‘Besides, I was with him all the time,’ says Joelle, smiling.
The next couple of days were a giddying round of celebrations. Theresa May hosted a visit to Downing Street. ‘She said she had a meeting in France but she’d decided not to go because she wanted to see us all instead,’ Jofra says.
WE MEET at Sussex County Cricket Ground — where Jofra plays his club cricket — and with us is his Barbadian stepdad Patrick Waithe, 52, a former police officer who works for the government bus company in Barbados.
Jofra’s biological father, Frank Archer, a retired London Underground driver, was born in Catford, south London, so Jofra — who has always held a British passport — was eligible to play for England.
Frank and Joelle split up when their son was three. Frank returned to the UK — he now lives in Liverpool — and continued to help support his son financially. Jofra would visit him during school holidays.
But it is Patrick who has been the formative male influence on Jofra’s life. Patrick, a keen cricketer himself, has raised Jofra since he was nine and nurtured his love of cricket; he even rolled a wicket with him outside the modest family home in Seaview, where they improvised cricket balls by wrapping tennis balls in tape.
Patrick remembers his first meeting with Jofra — who’s renowned for the relaxed way in which he launches the ball at a staggering 95 mph.
‘I was playing an evening game of cricket when I went to say hi to Joelle. I asked her if Jofra would like to join in and he didn’t hesitate. He was ready with his bat and ball.
‘He’d be up at the crack of dawn playing. He was just the loveliest of boys, so easy.’
‘But he broke a lot of windows,’ says Joelle. ‘I paid for the first one, but after that I said, “No more. It’s down to you now, Jofra”.’
‘He hasn’t paid for all those windows yet,’ laughs Patrick.
‘In my defence, when I started working I was living in England,’ adds Jofra. ‘And I think by then the price of the windows had magically gone up.’ He smiles. As a youngster, he was gifted at both football and cricket, but it was Patrick who encouraged him to invest all his talent in the latter.
‘I remember taking him to football camp. He was about 11 or 12, and the coach said, “He’s a really good cricketer, you know”. And that was the football coach!
‘He used to bowl very fast, even playing in the yard. It was as if he’d been plugged into the mains.
‘By the age of 14, he was playing senior club cricket. After school he’d ride to the cricket club on his bike where I’d join him after work and we’d practise in the nets.’
I ask Joelle, a seamstress and clothes designer, when she spotted her son’s talent for the game. She says: ‘It wasn’t about cricket to begin with, but we recognised early that he would be athletic. He was always doing something physical: riding his bike, running, roller-skating.
‘He was two when he started rollerskating through the house, and his speed and confidence scared me. He was a daredevil and I was always on tenterhooks. One day he started riding his bicycle on my work table. He fell and broke his hand, and had to go to hospital.’ ‘I didn’t cry, though!’ insists Jofra. ‘ I’ve always thought he was amazing,’ Joelle goes on. ‘Well, not amazing,’ she amends, ‘but special.’
‘Well mums are supposed to say that,’ smiles her son.
They share an obvious rapport; quietly teasing, affectionate. He recalls how she used to pack him off to cricket with a box full of macaroni pie or rice. ‘She’d always ask, “Where’s your lunch bowl?” when I got home.’
‘I lost count of the number of
Tupperware bowls he left at the ground,’ smiles Joelle.
Even now her son is grown-up, Joelle’s influence prevails. ‘I pray every morning. Mum would be upset if I didn’t,’ says Jofra.
‘The mum of one of my best mates, Fontana, sent me a prayer on the day of the final — but then again, she’d say prayers for me before every match.’
Joelle points out that she has taught him, too, the values of thrift, diligence and tidiness. ‘We always lived modestly,’ she says. ‘Jofra was never pampered. He’d wear hand-me-down cricket gear.
‘He’s always been a neat child,’ she adds, ‘and it’s continued into his adult life. The people he lives with can testify to that.’
And though money was never plentiful, Jofra wanted for nothing: his late grandparents Eric and Cora, who helped raise him, made sure of that. Although they live on opposite sides of the world, Joelle and her son keep closely in touch, FaceTiming regularly; not so much to chat, she explains, but so she can feel she’s near him.
Sometimes she just watches him playing on his Xbox: she in the lilac- painted family home in Barbados; he in his flat overlooking the cricket ground in Hove.
Both mother and son are softly spoken and reserved, but they also share a quiet line in humour. Jofra, who has his mum’s birth date tattooed on one arm, and a gold chain, a gift from Patrick, round his neck, is prone to mischief.
As he stood with the England cricket team on the steps of 10 Downing Street next to the Prime Minister this week, he made bunny ears behind a team mate’s head.
I ask Jofra if his mum was strict. ‘She didn’t have to be,’ he says. ‘A child is a product of his environment. And I was nurtured and loved by all my family.’
The whole extended family built homes next to each other on a plot of land they jointly owned, so Jofra grew up with his grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins nearby.
Joelle is one of eight children; Jofra, though an only child, was never short of company. Patrick’s daughter, Tsedale, 21, often visited and he had a multitude of cousins. One of them, Ashantio Blackman, died tragically this summer: shot outside his home on May 31, the day after Jofra bowled England to a victory over South Africa in the World Cup. ‘I heard there was a shooting but you never think it will be someone related to you,’ he recalls. ‘My mum rang me the next morning. I had a tear.
‘We were in the same school, the same year. We’d run around playing football together.
‘ But you have to shut your emotions off. There’s enormous pressure on you to do your job, and you have to get on with it.
‘I didn’t tell anyone. One of the other players, Jason Roy, must have noticed I was subdued, and he asked me if I was all right. But I didn’t say anything.
‘You go to the ground, you train; you play. You do your best to keep everything together.’
There was no moment of revelation when he knew he’d play for England. ‘I knew I wanted to play international cricket from a very young age, and I’ve always had a British passport,’ he says. ‘But once I’d come here, I couldn’t see myself playing cricket anywhere else.’
The story goes that Jofra, suffering from a back injury at the time, was unimpressed to be left out of the West Indies squad for the Under-19 World Cup in 2014. He denies that this prompted his decision, aged 18, to come to England.
But burdened by stress fractures in his back — an occupational hazard for fast bowlers — he began his career at sleepy Middleton-onSea, a Sussex village in the second division of the county league.
HE DIDN’T stay long, however. As his then captain remarked, despite his sore back Jofra’s first ball was delivered with such power ‘it nearly killed the poor batsman’.
It wasn’t long before Sussex spotted him and he was playing for its academy of young talent, bowling with consummate ease, pace and control that set him apart.
Technically — despite his British passport and father — he wasn’t eligible to play for England until 2022. But a deft change in the rules by the England and Wales Cricket Board cut the required residency period from seven to three years, and allowed Jofra to slip into the squad at the eleventh hour.
now he has taken more wickets than any other England bowler at a single World Cup, passing even Sir Ian Botham. And, of course, he powered us to our first ever victory in the competition.
It is quite a feat for one so young, who has been propelled from obscurity to global sporting stardom in one dazzling afternoon.
I ask if Jofra has a girlfriend. He does, but declines to name her. He is learning that with acclaim comes loss of privacy: he does not want to push her into the public gaze.
Patrick observes that his stepson is constantly being stopped for selfies, ‘and he even got a marriage proposal on Twitter’, he laughs.
‘I didn’t anticipate all this would happen,’ admits Joelle. ‘I didn’t think I’d be drawn in. Thanks to the English hospitality I’m handling it better than I thought.’
One man has been notably absent from all the excitement: Jofra’s father Frank, 55, watched his son’s trophy- winning performance from a pub in Liverpool with cricket-loving friends.
He told the Mail this week that when his son reached the age of eight, it was his ‘mission’ that Jofra would play international cricket.
‘After the tournament, Dad emailed to say congratulations,’ Jofra says. ‘He said I’d set a good example to other kids. I still see him, but it’s a bit of a trek to Liverpool and I’ve been so busy I haven’t been able to go up.’
Although Frank did not figure prominently in his son’s young life, Jofra says: ‘He’d always call me on the phone. I came over to London for a couple of summers to see him when I was younger, but once I’d decided to play cricket for my school it was either Dad or the cricket. And by the time I was 14, the cricket had won.’
Such is the level of grit and single-minded devotion needed to become a champion. And Jofra, we can be assured, will not stop dazzling us for many years to come.
But before he returns to cricket, a holiday in Barbados is planned — he’ll go home to see his dogs, Sheeba and Sanju.
‘Everyone will come over, all my family and friends, and I’m sure it will be a little bit crazy,’ he says. ‘But we don’t have to go out to have a good time. We’ll stay home and enjoy the simple things.’