Jofra Archer will begin bowling in a fortnight after successful surgery to remove glass from hand

Jofra Archer will return to bowling in a fortnight in a bid to prove his fitness for the Indian Premier League.

Archer, 25, remains hopeful that he will be able to play a proportion of the IPL season with Rajasthan Royals and will test out his ongoing elbow problem once he has been given the all-clear in a follow-up appointment for Monday’s hand surgery.

The operation to remove a piece of glass embedded in his right middle finger coincided with a rest period designed to let his elbow injury settle following a second cortisone injection of the year last week, and is unlikely to delay his schedule.

As Sportsmail reported earlier this month, although Archer, the IPL’s reigning MVP with a £800,000 deal, will miss the start of this year’s competition, beginning on April 9, the plan is for him to make his comeback during its latter stages.

However, the ECB will want to see how the elbow responds when he resumes training in the week beginning April 12 before sanctioning such a move.

If he experiences no pain, it might be viewed as preferential for him to play Twenty20 over County Championship cricket, partly due to the comparative workloads involved for a fast bowler and partly because a return to India would provide him with more high-quality experience ahead of the Twenty20 World Cup there this autumn.

If a problem that prevented his selection for two Tests against Virat Kohli’s team resurfaces, surgery cannot be discounted.

That was a route the ECB’s medical team avoided when Archer was ruled out of the one-day series in India after the discomfort increased in his bowling arm.

The 2019 World Cup-winning star was troubled throughout the tour and was ruled out of the final Test after a flare-up.

Further deterioration during the five T20 internationals led to Ashley Giles, England’s managing director, being informed on the eve of the series decider that he would not be fit enough to get through the trio of ODIs in Pune.

As a multi-format player, Archer remains an integral part of bids to unite global limited-overs titles and wrest the Ashes back from Australian hands later this year.

Archer was diagnosed with a stress fracture in the same elbow last year, but he says the discomfort experienced this time has been in a different place. 

On Monday, he underwent a surgical procedure carried out by Doug Campbell – the same consultant that fixed Ben Stokes’ self-inflicted wrist fracture seven years ago.

Leeds-based Campbell removed the fragment of glass that had been trapped in a healed wound below his right middle finger for more than two months.

The freakish cut was incurred prior to him hooking up with the England squad on the subcontinent, when he returned from Barbados to his home in Hove in the new year and shattered a fish tank while trying to clean it in his bath.

Yet it only became obvious there was a problem after the irritation increased during the final days of his tour.

Not until March 14 when he wore a protective strapping pre-match for a Twenty20 international in Ahmedabad had there been any obvious indication of an issue, and even then only a select few members of England’s medical staff were informed.

When Ben Langley, the ECB’s medical services lead, observed an increase in the swelling – caused by a foreign body being trapped under the skin – it was decided to send him north to the Spire Hospital on Monday.

It was Campbell who pinned the fractured scaphoid bone in Stokes’ wrist – after he slammed a dressing room locker with the open palm of his hand in frustration following a dismissal for nought in Barbados in 2014, an injury that sidelined him for five weeks and caused the then 22-year-old to miss the World Twenty20 in Bangladesh.

In contrast, the minor surgical procedure will not delay Archer’s return to action but the ECB and Rajasthan Royals’ doctors remain in dialogue about his participation.