“With Jof the easiest thing for him to have done is just gone purely white ball,” Mahmood tells BBC Sport.
“He’d have been financially better off and had all of that. But I could always tell he wanted to play Test cricket. I just knew it.”
Mahmood could be proven right over the coming weeks after Archer’s recall into England’s team for the third Test against India at Lord’s. After an injury-ravaged four and a half years, Archer is on the brink of a return to cricket’s biggest stage.
It has been a story of cruel blows, hard work and false starts and one that results in the most intriguing question of all. Just what can be expected of Archer the Test bowler in 2025?
‘Like a £100m signing – a cheat code’
With the passing of time, it is easy to forget just how good Jofra Archer was in his first international summer in 2019.
A World Cup winner and an Ashes weapon, he seemingly had it all.
Aged just 24, he was bowling knuckle balls in a super over to win a 50-over World Cup against New Zealand, delivering one of the great spells of fast bowling to Steve Smith against Australia on Test debut and swinging it around corners at Headingley to take six wickets and make Ben Stokes’ miracle possible.
He took 22 wickets in four matches in that Ashes series. By his seventh Test he had taken three five-wicket hauls – as many as Andrew Flintoff managed in his entire Test career.
“It was like what it must feel like in football for guys to go and spend £100m on a player and bosh you’ve got him straight up,” England team-mate Chris Woakes recalls.
“What was quite nice is other teams didn’t know what he was capable of because they hadn’t seen him.
“It felt like a bit of a cheat code. As soon as I saw him bowl I thought he was going to dominate international cricket because he is a serious talent, especially for such a young guy.”
But if Archer’s first summer was the debut album that went platinum, the following winter was the difficult second album.
Only two wickets came across two Tests in a series defeat in New Zealand.
After he bowled 42 overs in one innings of the first Test, captain Joe Root said he had to learn “every spell counts”.
“You really have got to run in and use that extra pace to your advantage,” Root said.
England had a new toy but were reading from the wrong instruction manual.