Picking a cricket team used to be simple: fit players in, injured players out. Not anymore. India’s squad for their landmark “home” T20I series against Afghanistan in Delhi has thrown up something unusual — four players named in the 15-man squad with a fitness asterisk next to their names.
The headline news is that Hardik Pandya has been left out, still not considered fully ready for competitive cricket. But the bigger talking point is the group of players picked despite selectors not being sure they’ll actually be fit in time. That list includes fast bowlers Jasprit Bumrah and Harshit Rana, plus all-rounders Nitish Reddy and Washington Sundar. For what is just a regular bilateral series, it’s an odd call to include players whose fitness isn’t yet confirmed.
The reason likely lies in India’s recent run of bad luck with injuries. Several players have been rushed back into the side, only to break down again soon after and that has pushed the BCCI toward a far more careful approach before clearing anyone for national duty.
Take Harshit Rana. He was out for five months with a knee injury before returning to international cricket on India’s Ireland and England tours. He played all five T20Is on that trip, but a fitness issue then ruled him out of the ODI series in England, where Prince Yadav took his place.
Jasprit Bumrah’s story is similar. He played two of the three ODIs against England and was expected to lead India’s bowling attack in the Test series in Sri Lanka. Instead, he was pulled out before the tour even began, with Auqib Nabi brought in as his replacement.
Top-order batter Sai Sudharsan faced the same situation, he too was set for the Sri Lanka tour but couldn’t recover in time and Sarfaraz Khan was added to the squad in his place.
There have been knock-on effects too: Suryansh Shedge made his India debut after stepping in for an unavailable Nitish Reddy, and Ravi Bishnoi replaced Varun Chakaravarthy for the T20Is against Zimbabwe.
All of this has put the spotlight on the BCCI’s Centre of Excellence, the facility where Indian players go through injury rehabilitation. The repeated setbacks have made the team management far more cautious, sources indicate that the medical staff now want to be completely certain, not just fairly confident, that a player has recovered before clearing him to return, and that the Centre is no longer willing to take any chances on borderline cases.
BCCI secretary Devajit Saikia addressed this exact issue last month. He explained that squads are usually picked three to four weeks before a team actually departs, which means selectors often don’t have a clear picture of a player’s recovery status at the time of announcement. That’s why a player still going through rehab gets named with the fitness asterisk, if he recovers within that three-to-four-week window, he simply joins the team as planned.
Devajit Saikia added that this approach protects players from being unfairly dropped. Since it’s genuinely uncertain whether someone will be fully fit by the time the series starts, marking them “subject to fitness” avoids ruling them out too early, while still giving the team flexibility if they don’t recover in time.
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