With a crammed cricket calendar and the resulting injury-related breakdown impacting players, the Indian team management has taken steps to address the concerns. The players are now given regular rests between series, especially fast bowlers and those who play all three formats regularly.
While India has quality right-arm pacers at their disposal across formats, they continue to miss a world-class left-arm pacer. In recent times, T Natarajan, Arshdeep Singh and even Jaydev Unadkat have emerged as likely options but none has been able to string together enough eye-catching performances to cement their spot.
Unadkat in fact is part of India’s ODI squad for the ongoing three-match series against West Indies and it’ll be interesting if he gets a game. With their first frontline pacers missing, India gave a debut to another right-arm pacer in Mukesh Kumar while Unadkat, who last played an ODI in 2013, was snubbed.
Former India cricketer and Jiocinema expert, RP Singh says the fact that bowlers aren’t playing enough red-ball cricket is impacting their progress.
Singh is also against workload management in terms of bowling as he feels the more one bowls, the better it gets.
“There’s a lot of discussion about it. We cricketers also discuss this among each other. I don’t really believe in workload management when it comes to bowling. Instead of bowling, you should have workload management for the gym. Bowlers actually bowl less. The more you bowl, the stronger your muscles will be. I don’t agree with the notion at all,” Singh was quoted as saying by Hindustan Times.
“We have come from a structure where bowlers used to bowl an hour-and-a-half straight in the nets. That’s how you improve your bowling. See, the bowlers have to take a stand and say that they want to bowl. You have to nurture your relationship with the ball. Not playing four-day matches, domestic cricket is a big reason behind the lack of quality pacers and left-arm pacers in particular,” he added.
He picked the example of Mohammed Siraj who was initially regarded as good enough for just Test cricket but eventually showed significant improvement in his white-ball game by toiling hard across formats.
“That’s why, left-armers perform in patches, they aren’t consistent. Arshdeep performs well in T20s, you can use him in longer formats. Mohsin… they have gone up and down. Siraj came, he was expensive at times, but he continued to toil and made his way into the Indian teams across all formats. His graph is going up. The left-arm pacers will have to follow his graph,” Singh said.
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