Mumbai: The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) said it will seek better scheduling in the upcoming Future Tours Programme (FTP) and strengthen player rehab protocols to combat rising injuries caused by a heavy workload of international and franchise games, said secretary Devajit Saikia on Thursday.
Injury management remains a central concern after several high-profile players like Hardik Pandya, Jasprit Bumrah, Nitish Kumar Reddy, Washington Sundar, and B. Sai Sudharsan missed recent tours despite initial conditional selections due to varied injuries.
With the likes of Bumrah, Sundar, Reddy and Harshit Rana named in the upcoming 15-man T20I squad against Afghanistan with the asterisk of ‘subject to fitness’, scrutiny on the Centre of Excellence (CoE) in Bengaluru has intensified, although Saikia and head of cricket, former India batter VVS Laxman, previously clarified that the high-performance centre is more than just a rehabilitation facility.
“Individual players are having injuries because they have to play a lot of matches. If you look at their schedule, in England, we had a 15-player team go for the ODIs, and out of that, three or four players got injured during the match. We have to think that they had played two months of IPL before that.
“So all this takes a toll on the health of the players. To avoid those kinds of situations under the present window and FTPs, we are trying to find out some ways to tackle it,” Saikia told reporters after a review meeting happened at BCCI headquarters in Mumbai on Thursday.
The high-level meetings, attended by Test and ODI captain Shubman Gill and T20I skipper Shreyas Iyer along with head coach Gautam Gambhir, evaluated existing return-to-play guidelines to ensure players undergo thorough clearance before resuming international duty.
“We have a protocol in place for how a player can come back to the matches again in international matches. So when a player is injured, he goes to his own physio, or he comes to the rehab programme in CoE, and before allowing him to be a part of the Indian team, there are certain measures they have to take and certain hurdles they have to cross.
“So those kinds of things, we have revisited today, and whatever is the best way we can take forward the players to have no injury in the international matches. We have discussed these issues, and we will further discuss this topic in our next meetings,” added Saikia.
He further clarified that the discussions focused purely on systemic policy rather than specific individual selection or fitness cases. “There was no discussion on any individual player. Today’s discussion was totally general in nature, and what policies and protocols we have to maintain regarding maintaining the fitness level of every player, not about any individual, and what is in the best interest of the team, we have considered that only.
“We have taken the feedback from the captains and the head coach, who are the right persons to give us the information, so that we chalk up a proper strategy to avoid all these kinds of unwanted situations during any international or bilateral matches.” IANS
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