India vs Afghanistan: Focus on gruelling schedule, workload amidst return of Bumrah, Washington and Nitish from injury

CHENNAI: Less than 72 hours after spending five days in the gruelling heat and humidity of Chennai during the Duleep Trophy final, at least two among Ishan Kishan, Vaibhav Sooryavanshi and Tilak Varma will take the field against Afghanistan in the first T20I on Sunday.

This is not news. It was well known as soon as they expressed their keenness to play in the final. However, the significance of it lies in the fact that this marks the beginning of a long and gruelling two months for Indian cricketers across formats.After three ‘away’ T20Is against Afghanistan in New Delhi, the Shreyas Iyer-led team will travel to Japan to play in a lone T20I with a four-day gap. Then, they will remain there for the Asian Games presumably till the final on October 3. Seventy two hours after the scheduled final, India will start their five T20Is against West Indies in Lucknow on October 6. That series will go on till October 17 before an Indian team take the field in Christchurch on October 22 for five T20Is against New Zealand which will end on November 1. And this is just the T20I team.While the BCCI and India have taken pride in the vast player pool, resources at their disposal and their ability to field multiple teams at the same time, the schedule, and the recurring injuries have become a cause for concern. India do have enough players to field three different teams in each format. However, there are a few who overlap at the moment. It is not hard to see how the cramped schedule has had a cascading effect on some of them. Nitish K Reddy, Washington Sundar, Shreyas himself, Harshit Rana, Shubman Gill, Jasprit Bumrah… They all play at least two formats and the toll is visible. Some of them have had recurring injuries too. Even Kishan, who had a niggle in New Delhi,The T20I skipper, whilst talking about injuries, put it down to the schedule on Saturday. “We need to understand, first of all, the amount of matches a player is playing continuously, rigorously. He’s prone to get injured some or the other way. Because the intensity is pretty high,” he explained in New Delhi. “We also need to understand that not every player thinks of getting injured deliberately. It is because they are putting efforts for the team. If that effort turns out to be on the negative side, you can’t control it,” he added.Though Shreyas did not comment on Saturday, the issue of scheduling was discussed at length during the recent BCCI review meeting in Mumbai. After the meeting, BCCI secretary Devajit Saikia told reporters that the BCCI is looking to work out a better Future Tours Programme going forward. “If you look in England, we had 15 players and out of that, 3-4 players got injured during the match but we have to think about how they have played two months of IPL prior to that. All this takes a toll on the health of the players also. To avoid those kinds of situations and what best we can do under the present windows and present FTPs, we are trying to find some ways out,” Saikia had explained.