A fleeting glance at them is enough for one to realize that they are, someday, going to be phenoms. These are often the players who turn out to be bigger than their teams and whose theatricals, regardless of whether they’re good or bad, inevitably end up being the single biggest talking point of the matches they play. Jofra Archer is the torchbearer of this player prototype. 

For nine months, Archer bore the brunt of it all and paid little attention to the criticism that came his way - until a few days ago. After former West Indies pacer Tino Best publicly chastised the youngster on Twitter after an erratic, soulless performance with the ball in the first innings versus the Windies on Day 3, Archer finally flipped. And he decided to respond to the ex-pacer the only way he knows; the Archer way: first on Twitter, through a borderline insulting Tweet, then on the field, through a heart-stirring display of hostile fast bowling on the final day of the Test to almost win the game for his country.

With Archer, the question has never been ‘Can he do it?’. Rather, the only question and accusation that has, time and again, been thrown at him is ‘why can’t he do it?’. The juxtaposition of the spells he bowled in the first and the second innings at the Ageas Bowl, in a way, depicted why perennial frustration has grown within fans in the 14 months of Archer they’ve witnessed.  On Day 3, he looked like he did not want to be at the ground. He looked more of an archer and less of The Archer - his lines and lengths were all over the place, his pace was down and it looked like he couldn’t wait for the sun to set so that he could get back to his bio-secure room and put his feet up.

Yet just a couple of days later, on the final day, with his side’s back against their walls, he brought to the fore the x-factor that has made every single cricket tragic fall in love with him. And that, exactly, is what has irked the fans for months - the inconsistency that he’s brought to the table. And, albeit it ended up coming off ugly, that was what Tino Best was trying to convey through his tweet, too. 

Just four innings into his Test career - mind you, by then he was already being celebrated as a potential English GOAT -  Archer put before the 26,000 people at Old Trafford, on the morning of Day 1, an abject display in what was supposed to be the Ashes-deciding Test, given it marked the return of Steve Smith after he’d recovered from his concussion. There, with momentum on England’s side, with them having done the impossible at Headingley, and with Australia under the pump, the speedster looked lackadaisical, uninterested and insouciant - like on Day 3 at the Ageas Bowl not so long ago, his accuracy went for a toss, he was mentally just not there and, for a vast majority of the match, he looked like a Cricket 07 bowler who was being controlled by a player whose ‘pace’ button in the controller was broken. 

That was passed as a one-off - obviously and rightfully so because he went and claimed the second six-wicket haul of his career in the very next Test. But then came the two-match Test series against New Zealand which ended up doing a significant amount of damage to his reputation - he ended up with an average of 104.50, the worst among the 11 bowlers who had bowled in that series (minimum 25 overs). That he was over-bowled and mismanaged in that series is undebatable, but the worrisome pattern that emerged in the Old Trafford Test snowballed; it escalated further in the first innings of the Centurion Test against South Africa and every tiny bit of evidence from the Ageas Bowl Test last week indicated that it had now become a habit. 

If Archer were to self-introspect today, he would probably agree to the fact that he has not done complete justice to his own talent. Of course, it would be downright foolish - and not right - to expect him to bowl spells like he did two days ago - or clock 95 mph - on a consistent basis, but the least he can do is commit to the cause for, at the end of the day, he is an international cricketer who is playing in the team at the expense of a bunch of other world-class bowlers. A good start to the same, right now, might be to tone down the repugnant nature of his performances on days where he is off-colour; he would go a long way in both keeping his reputation intact and helping his team out by improving the 1/10 he’s been delivering on bad days to a 3/10.

Jofra Archer is a generational talent, yes, but the undeniable truth is that he has, till date, lost more matches for his country than he’s won. A Tino Best tweet woke up the beast inside him at the Ageas Bowl, and he must be grateful for that, but unless and until he learns to summon it himself more often, he would, to the fans, look like a disinterested soul who is lost in a world he hates. It is up to him to fix that and, like it or not, every action of his will be inevitably examined through a microscope till the very last ball he bowls owing to his disposition.