During the eleventh edition of Indian Premier League (IPL), the BCCI is likely to monitor the contracted Indian bowlers’ number of deliveries in the nets. As per the report in The Indian Express, the Indian cricket board had decided to take this step to curtail the workload of Jasprit Bumrah, Bhuvneshwar Kumar and R Ashwin among others in the contract list.
The report further suggests that every foreign cricket board that provides NoCs for its players to come play in the IPL have an agreement with the BCCI which states that they won’t be overburdened to avoid fatigue.
“The board will soon have a clause where a contracted bowler with the BCCI will have limitations on how much he can bowl in the nets. The respective franchises will be informed once the proper paperwork is completed. The paper is yet to be formalised as the board will be looking at adding it as an additional clause in the contracts between players and franchises. It’s a move that has being considered to protect our players from burnout. They are anyway coming off a heavy workload while playing for India and with a hectic calendar ahead,” a top BCCI official quoted by The Indian Express as saying.
After a hectic 58-day long tour of South Africa, Indian selectors have rested two of their leading bowlers Jasprit Bumrah and Bhuvneshwar Kumar for the Nidahas Trophy in Sri Lanka. Bumrah had bowled a total of 162.1 overs in less than two months, which included his maiden Test series against South Africa, and he will be Mumbai Indians’ key fast bowler in IPL 2018, scheduled to start on April 7.
“Our primary goal is to monitor his workload very carefully with so much international cricket ahead. We need to be careful that he is not over-used. For each and every fast bowler, the balance of workload is very important and the high performance team will be monitoring it closely,” chief selector MSK Prasad had recently told PTI.
Earlier this week, India skipper Virat Kohli has admitted that too much of workload is taking toll on his body and he will have to be careful going ahead in his career.
“Physically, I had a few niggles, I am just getting over those. The workload has started to disagree with me a little bit. I have to be very careful about how I go forward with my body, my mind, my cricket. Times like these are very, very important. I am totally enjoying it; I do not even have an inch of me missing out on anything because my body really needed this,” Kohli had said at a promotional event on Tuesday.
