After surgery he was advised to rest for three months, but in May his doctor was disappointed with his progress and the clock was reset. On his return Jones was “told by a London specialist that an operation should clear up the trouble once and for all”. Jones bowls for England against West Indies in the summer of 1966, as Garfield Sobers looks on. I had a medical examination and the surgeon was very satisfied.” Before I went to Pakistan I had no suspicions the elbow would go. “I am bound to be worried about my future career. “It seems likely that surgery is the only answer,” he said. The day England arrived in Pakistan it was announced that Jones was to immediately head home. “I felt a twinge and then it went completely, swelling like a balloon at the joint,” he said.

“He was full of bounce and life, convinced he had got over the injury,” Wooller said.īut in Sri Lanka the elbow went again.

The rest of that summer passed in a blur of cortisone injections and medical manipulations, but he played against Cambridge University in June and, after a minor operation in August, for MCC against Yorkshire in September, doing enough to win a place on England’s winter tour to Sri Lanka and Pakistan. He was 26 and would play only two more first-class games, and bowl fewer than 35 more overs. Jones declared himself fit for the start of the 1968 season, but in early June the injury flared up again. I told John Snow and he said just to rest it until the start of our season and it would be OK. “I went to throw it in under-arm,” he said, many years later. He ended the fifth Test against West Indies in March 1968 a hero, his unbeaten 12-ball innings of nought at No 11 helping his side to the draw that sealed a 1-0 series victory.īut it was this game that changed his career in all the wrong ways – and all he did was throw a ball. Archer has played 13 Tests and taken 42 wickets, two fewer on both counts than the number Jones had reached when the wheels came off. It is here that we hope the pair’s stories diverge, because for Jones the injury issues continued until it became obvious that his career would end before they did. For Jones was – a familiar story, this – a brilliant fast bowler whose career was derailed in his mid-20s by an injury to the elbow of his bowling arm that simply would not stop hurting, and spent two years embarking on a succession of aborted comebacks, every one breathlessly reported in the nation’s media. It is increasingly hard not to not to think of Jones when the latest Archer newsflash pops up, and the England bowler jets home from another injury-affected foreign trip.

To the letter by simon garfield