“We still think you’ll be alright,” Rob Key tells Jofra Archer, and what else can he say? It’s them or us, big lad? Step one foot into that gilded ballroom and you’re finished as a Test cricketer?

Key, a keen poker player, is nobody’s fool. He’s sat around plenty of tables in recent times, reminding himself that what separates the sharps from the mugs isn’t knowing what makes a good hand, but how best to play a bad one. He’s learnt to sit in, and play the long game. To bleed the metaphor dry, the stakes have rarely been higher, and the tables never so crammed.

This is not new territory for English cricket. It’s been locked in an unsteady truce with the IPL’s overlords for years. But recently the rules of engagement have shifted, and Archer has unwittingly become the prized trophy in a bruising tug-of-war.

The background then: up until late November, Archer was going to miss IPL 2025. It had been agreed with the ECB, with whom he has a central contract, that he would have a year off the IPL to focus on playing for Sussex in the Championship’s early rounds, with a view to ‘loading up’ the body for a return to Test cricket later that summer. He agreed to this on the understanding that he would be back for the 2026 edition.

It may not surprise you to learn that this didn’t work for the IPL’s ruling committee. Just days before the start of the ‘mega-auction’ ahead of the 2025 edition, it was announced that any overseas player absenting himself from selection in that market would be barred from entering in 2026 and 2027

In effect, Archer would be locking himself out of the IPL for three seasons. That’s the best part of £4m, waived, which was never going to happen. And so with crushing inevitability, Archer entered the IPL market after all, to be snapped up by his old pals at Rajasthan Royals for £1.2m. Obscenity? Who really cares.

In early December, a few days after the auction, Key spoke to Wisden’s Jo Harman about this issue and much else.

“We’re very much in a new world,” he says. “All of a sudden I’ll get franchise owners ringing me about our players. It’s exploded just in the two-and-a-bit years I’ve been in the job.”

It’s tricky, he says, with admirable understatement. “Because you don’t quite know where it’s going to end up. I don’t think we want to be in a place where centrally contracted players start walking away from English cricket. Let’s say Jofra signs for a franchise to play all year round, we won’t see him for England. Franchise owners won’t say, ‘Oh, that’s fine, we’ll pay him $2m and you can go and bowl him 20 overs a day in a Test match’.”

And there’s the rub. For now, franchise contracts effectively function as freelance work for certain months of the year. But the plates are shifting fast, and Key knows it.

Take Jofra’s (sometime) paymasters, the Royals Sports Group. Hemmed in by the IPL’s relatively short profit window, in 2021 they took their brand to Barbados for the Caribbean Premier League, where overnight the Tridents became the Royals. A year later, it was Paarl for the SA20. Same coloured kits, similar roster of core superstars. Each expansion takes more of the calendar, securing the Royals brand, and making lots more money. You can see where this is going. The guns are on the Nursery Ground. Key can see them from his office window.

The immediate upshot is that Archer’s hopes of playing any Test cricket next summer against India (oh, the irony etc) recede further into the distance.

Key argues that their plan for Archer is still valid, that his red-ball return will only be delayed by a couple of months, that his workloads are still increasing as planned, and that he was only ever going to play a couple of Test matches next summer anyway. But he will know that the chances are thinner, that the risks of exposing Archer to the rigours of a Test match with next to no first-class cricket behind him border on professional negligence.

The Ashes remains a distant dream, but it’s perhaps a more attainable one than India next summer. And should England’s one truly generational fast bowler make that trip and get to play, it will be a beautiful thing. But even in that moment, Jofra back in the whites, illumined by the iridescent light of a Brisbane Test match, the immensity of his comeback may yet be tinged with poignancy: for all the years of him that we lost, and all that may yet be sacrificed.

You can hear Jo’s full interview with Rob Key via the Wisden Patreon podcast service. Sign up for as little as a fiver a month.