Bumrah is back in India’s ODI plans, and it points straight at 2027
Named in an India ODI squad for the first time since the 2023 final, Jasprit Bumrah has become the clearest signpost to where the team’s white-ball priorities now sit.
Jul 9, 2026
India were blown away in a T20I in Nottingham this week to fall 2-0 down in the series, but the most important cricketing decision of their English summer was made off the field. When Ajit Agarkar’s selection panel named the 15-man ODI squad for the England series, one name mattered more than any debate over the T20I batting order: Jasprit Bumrah is back in India’s 50-over plans for the first time since the 2023 World Cup final.
That is not a small thing. Bumrah has not played an ODI for India since the night in Ahmedabad when Australia lifted the trophy in November 2023. For the best part of three years since, he has been kept away from the format entirely while India rode out two T20 World Cups and an endless run of bilateral cricket without their best bowler in coloured clothing. His return, for a series starting in Birmingham on July 14, is the clearest sign yet of where the team’s thinking has moved.
The T20Is were skipped on purpose
It is worth being clear about why Bumrah sat out the T20Is against Ireland and England in the first place. This was not an injury, and it was not a loss of form. Agarkar has spelled out that resting Bumrah from the shortest format is a deliberate call, with his long-term fitness for Test cricket and the 2027 ODI World Cup treated as the priority ahead of any T20I bilateral.
The logic is hard to argue with once you accept the premise that Bumrah cannot play everything. His action puts more stress through the body than almost any bowler in the world, and India have already lived through what happens when he breaks down at the wrong moment. So the plan for the next 18 months is blunt: T20Is are the format he can afford to miss, and ODIs are the one he cannot. Tests, in this hierarchy, are described as non-negotiable.
Everything is pointed at 2027
The destination here is the 2027 ODI World Cup in southern Africa, and the calendar is being reverse-engineered around it. Rather than burn Bumrah’s overs on a T20 series India can lose without lasting damage, the selectors want him building rhythm and fitness in the 50-over game across the cycle. He is expected to feature in more ODIs than T20Is between now and late 2027, which is a full inversion of the recent pattern where he barely touched the format at all.
There is a slight risk in the approach. A bowler who has not played an ODI in nearly three years is being asked to walk back into the side and lead the attack in conditions that will not always suit him, and match sharpness in a format is not something you can simply schedule back into existence. But the alternative, running him into the ground in games that do not shape a World Cup, is worse. India have chosen the version of the gamble that protects the asset they most need standing in 2027.
A reset the white-ball group actually needs
For all the noise around the T20I side this month, the ODI squad is where India’s serious rebuilding is happening. Shubman Gill leads the group as captain, with Shreyas Iyer as his deputy, and the return of senior names alongside Bumrah gives the 50-over side a different weight to the experimental T20I outfit that came up short at Trent Bridge. The two projects are not the same, and it would be a mistake to read India’s white-ball health off the T20I results alone.
The first ODI in Birmingham on July 14 will not answer every question. But watching Bumrah run in for India in coloured clothing again, after so long away, is the moment this tour was really building towards.