BCCI 'trying to find some ways out' of frequent player injuries

Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) secretary Devajit Saikia has linked Indian players' frequent injury setbacks to their packed schedule as he asserted the board's commitment to resolve the concurrent issue.

The Men in Blue, who toured England for five T20Is and three ODIs in July this year, following their shock 2-1 defeat in the shortest format away against Ireland, failed to field their best XIs in either white-ball assignments against the Three Lions, with Jasprit Bumrah, Harshit Rana, Washington Sundar and Nitish Kumar Reddy injured.

The injury woes ultimately resulted in India suffering a humiliating 4-0 defeat in the T20Is before suffering a 2-1 drubbing in the longer format.

For the upcoming three-match away series against Afghanistan in New Delhi this month, India's squad featured four players, whose participations were subject to fitness clearance from the BCCI's Centre of Excellence.

Consequently, the issue was brought up during the BCCI top management's meeting with head coach Gautam Gambhir, the director of cricket at the Centre of Excellence (CoE) VVS Laxman, T20I captain Shreyas Iyer and ODI captain Shubman Gill here on Thursday.

Saikia, meanwhile, insisted that measures were taken to ensure players get enough time to rest and recover in the next Future Tours Programme (FTP).

"Individual players are having injuries because they have to play a lot of matches. If you look at their schedule, if you look at England, a 15-player team went for the ODI and out of that 15, three to four players got injured," Saikia said.

"But they had played two months of IPL prior to that. So all this takes toll on the health of the players also. And to avoid those kind of situations, what best we can do under the present windows and present FTPs, we are trying to find out some ways out."

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