It is both a huge compliment to Stokes and a concern that he offered so much more threat than the rest of his bowling attack, particularly with the old ball.<\/p>\n
Stokes has taken six wickets after a ball is 40 overs old in this series. Chris Woakes, Brydon Carse, Jofra Archer and Josh Tongue have taken two wickets combined across the same period.<\/p>\n
It shows his bowling really is world class.<\/p>\n
Archer’s return to Test cricket has been largely encouraging but on Sunday he discovered what it is to be truly Test-match fit.<\/p>\n
His feet looked sore, his pace was down to 83mph in his final spell and he did not look as threatening.<\/p>\n
It also confirmed he is not the express bowler some people expect him to be.<\/p>\n
He can do that role for a spell here or there where he really heats things up, like he did at times in his comeback at Lord’s, but he is not like Mark Wood.<\/p>\n
Wood can bowl at 95mph whenever you throw him the ball but, for whatever reason, Archer’s rhythm is not always there.<\/p>\n
It is great he is back and that he has been able to play two games is another step on his progression to playing in the Ashes.<\/p>\n
Now he just needs a few weeks to put his feet up because if he did not remember what Test cricket feels like, he will now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It is both a huge compliment to Stokes and a concern that he offered so much more threat…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":297216,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4101],"tags":[1406,79,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-297215","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cricket","8":"tag-cricket","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114928103307526255","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297215","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=297215"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297215\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/297216"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=297215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=297215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=297215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}