BENGALURU — BCCI secretary Devajit Saikia travelled to Bengaluru on Sunday to sit down with Head of Cricket VVS Laxman and go through the rehabilitation programme player by player, after a third member of the Test squad for Sri Lanka was ruled out inside a fortnight.
Around ten internationals are currently working through injuries at the BCCI Centre of Excellence, the facility that replaced the National Cricket Academy and was built to be the place where this problem gets solved. It has been running without a permanent head of sports science since Nitin Patel left the post in early 2025.
“Secretary Saikia will be in Bengaluru to take a stock of the situation,” a board official told PTI, confirming the meeting with Laxman. The official said it was “not known whether head coach” Gautam Gambhir or chief selector Ajit Agarkar would join remotely.
Who is in the building
The Test list alone is long. Jasprit Bumrah is being managed for swelling in his left knee. B Sai Sudharsan has a stress fracture in his big toe. Harshit Rana and Nitish Kumar Reddy are both hamstring cases. Washington Sundar has a quadriceps injury. Akash Deep has been out the longest of any of them, with a lower back stress fracture dating to Bengal’s Ranji Trophy semi-final.
The white-ball group adds more. Hardik Pandya is recovering from a quadriceps problem, Varun Chakravarthy and Prince Yadav from hamstrings. Riyan Parag has also been at the centre.
Read that list as a pattern rather than a run of bad luck. Four hamstrings, two stress fractures, two quadriceps. Those are load injuries, the kind that accumulate from bowling and running volume rather than from collisions. They are the specific category that a sports science department exists to prevent.
The vacancy at the top
Patel had held the sports science role for years and left in early 2025. Dhananjay Kaushik has been running the function on an interim basis since. Interim is a workable arrangement for a quarter. It is a different thing across eighteen months and a calendar that has included a T20 World Cup at home, a full IPL season, a tour of England and now a Test tour of Sri Lanka.
The consequence shows up in decisions rather than in treatment. Nobody has suggested the rehab work at Bengaluru is poor. What a permanent head provides is the authority to say no: to tell selectors a player is not available, to set return-to-play thresholds that hold under pressure, and to push back on a workload plan that the cricket side wants and the body cannot take.
Selection that outsources the risk
That gap is visible in how this squad was picked. Bumrah and Sudharsan were both named in the original 15 subject to a fitness clearance from the Centre of Excellence. The selectors chose them on the assumption that the recovery would land in time, and left the medical staff to confirm or refuse it later.
Both refusals came. Bumrah was ruled out last week and replaced by Auqib Nabi. Sudharsan, who had been struck on the toe in the second unofficial Test against Sri Lanka A in Galle in July and retired hurt, did not travel with the squad at all; scans at Bengaluru found swelling that had not settled, and no replacement had been named by Sunday evening.
Naming players subject to fitness is common practice everywhere. Doing it with two of the top six in a two-Test series is a bet, and when it fails the team goes into a tour short.
The captain, too
Shubman Gill added to it on the eve of the warm-up game. The board said he “sustained an impact injury to his right ring finger” during practice on Thursday, and that “as a precautionary measure, he will not take the field on Day 1” of the match against a Sri Lanka Cricket XI. KL Rahul captained in his place.
An impact injury to a finger is not a load injury and does not belong in the pattern above. It matters because of what it lands on top of. India are also without Sundar for at least the first Test, which leaves a squad already carrying four replacements looking for a settled XI four days before Galle.
What the tour game showed
Colombo produced the one clean answer. Devdutt Padikkal made an unbeaten 142 off 164 balls at the Nondescripts ground, retiring out on reaching his hundred and coming back later in the innings. He now walks into the No. 3 spot Sudharsan had made his own after the retirements of Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli.
Ravindra Jadeja made 63 off 117 in his first red-ball outing since returning to the Test setup. Manav Suthar made 41, Rahul 40. Kuldeep Yadav took two for 76 from 18 overs on the opening day. India closed day two six runs behind with a wicket standing and three batters retired out.
Sudharsan’s absence is still a loss with a number attached. On the India A tour of Sri Lanka in July, on the same kind of surfaces, he made 132, 7 not out, 168 and 25 not out.
The calendar nobody controls
Behind the injury list sits a schedule that has not stopped. Since the start of 2026 India have played a home T20 World Cup, a full IPL season running from late March to the end of May, a standalone Test against Afghanistan in June, and are now in Sri Lanka. The players in rehab at Bengaluru are largely the multi-format cricketers who appeared in all of it.
The board does not set the IPL window and the international calendar in isolation from each other, and the franchises have their own medical staff with their own incentives. A bowler managed conservatively by the national side in April can be bowling four overs a night for a team that has paid for him. Nobody in that chain is doing anything unreasonable, and the outcome is the list above.
What the board can actually change
Saikia cannot fix hamstrings in a Sunday meeting. Three things are within reach.
The first is filling the sports science post permanently, with someone senior enough to overrule a selection preference. The second is a workload protocol that binds across formats and franchises, because a fast bowler’s season is currently split between a board that manages him for Tests and an IPL side that does not. The third is transparency about return dates, which would end the cycle of a player being named, cleared conditionally, and then withdrawn a week later.
The first Test starts at Galle on 15 August, the second at the Sinhalese Sports Club in Colombo on 23 August. Both are World Test Championship fixtures, and India sit fifth in the table with four wins and four defeats from nine matches. The team that takes the field on Saturday will be the fourth-choice version of the one that was picked.
