Former New Zealand pacer and ex-MI bowling coach Shane Bond has urged the BCCI and Indian team management to smartly manage Jasprit Bumrah’s workload as he fears another back injury to the pacer could end his career.
Bumrah suffered an injury on the second day of the fifth India-Australia Test in Sydney earlier this year, and he has been out of action since. He was included in India's Champions Trophy 2025 roster but was later replaced by Harshit Rana owing to a lower-back ailment.
He is currently undergoing rehabilitation at the BCCI's Centre of Excellence in Bengaluru, and there is no official word on when he will return to competitive cricket.
According to Bond, whose career was also hindered by repeated back ailments, Bumrah's next back issue in the same location where he had surgery in 2023 "could be a career-ender."
“When he went off for scans, it was at Sydney; there was some messaging coming up around that he had sprains and stuff like that. I worried that it wasn’t going to be a sprain; it might be a bony injury around that area (the back). I thought he mmightstruggle to make the Champions Trophy if it was.
I think Booms (Bumrah) will be fine, but it’s just that (workload) management (matters). Looking at the tours and the schedule going forward, where are the opportunities to give him a break, but really, where are the danger periods? And often it is that the (transition from) IPL to the Test Championship will be a risk," Bond told ESPNcricinfo.
Bond urged the Indian team management not to play Jasprit Bumrah for more than two Test matches in a row, stating that overusing the pacer might lead to another injury and ending his career as well.
“He’s too valuable for the next World Cup and stuff. So, you’d be looking at five Tests in England; I wouldn’t want to be playing him in any more than two in a row. Coming out of the back end of the IPL into a Test match is going to be a huge risk. And so how they manage that is going to be key.
They may say, Look, it’s four Test matches in total. Or three. If we can get him through the English summer and he’s fit, we can probably then go with some confidence that we can carry him across the rest of the formats. So that’s hard because he is your best bowler, but if he has another injury in the same spot, that could be a career-ender, potentially, because I’m not sure you can have surgery on that spot again," Bond added.
Bumrah is reportedly set to miss the first week of the IPL 2025 as he has just started bowling in the nets at the NCA and is yet to regain his full workload quota.
