It feels as if senior India pacer Ishant Sharma has taken an indirect dig at the current Indian team management of Rohit Sharma, Rahul Dravid, and the selectors over the topic of “workload management” of players, in particular their pacers.
Ishant, who was dropped from the Test squad earlier this year, reckons the “workload” is simply a term everyone has come up with, and he doesn’t concur with the idea of resting pacers when they are fit.
Ishant Sharma doesn’t believes in frequent “rests” of fast bowlers
Over the past couple of years, Team India has given regular breaks to their all-format pacers – Jasprit Bumrah and Mohammed Shami – however, despite the regular breaks, both of them have sustained injuries. Bumrah missed the Asia Cup and the T20 World Cup due to back injury and both he and Shami are currently missing the Bangladesh Test series.
In an interview with Sportstar, the 34-year-old Ishant Sharma, who is the only Indian pacer after Kapil Dev to play in 100 Tests, said that he didn’t get such regular rests when he was actively playing international cricket.
“The only thing I would say right now is: ‘Do not think too much about the workload’. That’s a new term that’s come up in recent times, especially for fast bowlers. I never saw something like that during my international stint,” Ishant was quoted as saying by Sportstar.
Having made his Test debut back in 2011, Ishant Sharma featured in 105 Tests in his career, the last of which was in November 2021 against New Zealand in Kanpur.
After that, Ishant didn’t feature in the playing XI. He was part of the squad for the tour of South Africa, but remained on the bench as Mohammed Siraj and Shardul Thakur were preferred. For the series against Sri Lanka in March, Ishant was dropped from the Test squad altogether with the selectors preferring younger seamers.
Overall, Ishant has taken 311 Test wickets to go with 115 ODI wickets. He is currently playing in the Ranji Trophy for Delhi.
