Hardik has been told to stop bowling, and India’s squad for Afghanistan is due this week

Hardik Pandya checked into the BCCI’s Centre of Excellence in Bengaluru on 2 June, a little over a week after Mumbai Indians’ IPL season finished. Three months on he is still there, and on Tuesday, with India’s selectors due to sit down this week and pick a squad for the Afghanistan T20Is, word came out of the CoE that he had been told to put the ball down again.

A niggle nobody has named

The detail is thin because no diagnosis has been made public. What has been briefed out is that Pandya was bowling at full intensity, felt discomfort in his leg, and was asked to stop.

“Hardik Pandya was operating at full intensity without any discomfort but he has been advised to pause bowling due to discomfort in the leg,” a source told the Times of India. “He will resume soon, but the Afghanistan series is too close to reach the required fitness levels.”

Batting and movement were not the problem. The bowling was, and for an all-rounder whose case for selection rests on being able to send down four overs, that is the part that decides it. The CoE wants to be fully convinced before it signs anything off, and it has twelve days.

What makes it sting is how quickly the picture flipped. As recently as Monday, reports out of Bengaluru had Pandya and Nitish Kumar Reddy both down as match-ready, two seam-bowling all-rounders who had been at the CoE so long that they only left it for personal commitments. One session at full tilt has undone that.

Half a year since the last cap

Pandya has not played for India since the T20 World Cup final on 8 March, the night India beat New Zealand by 96 runs in Ahmedabad to retain the trophy. He has not played for anybody since 24 May. If he misses this series, the gap between his last international appearance and his next one will have run past six months.

None of it has been one clean injury. A back spasm cost him four IPL matches. He was still working through that when a low-grade quadriceps problem showed up on 9 June, days after he arrived in Bengaluru, and a scan and a short rest turned into a three-week training programme that ruled him out of the Afghanistan ODIs. The England white-ball tour went the same way, and the reason given then is the reason again now.

“Hardik has not been able to attain the requisite amount of bowling volume and conditioning required,” was the explanation briefed out in June. He is 32, and the bowling volume is still the thing standing between him and an India shirt.

Who else the selectors are waiting on

Washington Sundar is the good news. He has been building his workload back up and is expected to be available, and the Delhi matches are meant to be a controlled way back in, not a full test of him. Nitish Kumar Reddy is also expected to be cleared.

Jasprit Bumrah is a harder call. A knee injury ruled him out of the Sri Lanka tour and he has been at the same Bengaluru facility since, with the CoE declining to put a timeline on him. He has been named in India’s Asian Games contingent for Japan, which starts days after the Afghanistan series ends, though the expectation is that he does not play there either. India have Tests against New Zealand and Australia to protect him for.

So the selectors sit down this week without their first-choice seam all-rounder, and without any date for the return of the best fast bowler in the world. The two players they can pick both need managing rather than throwing straight back in.

What Shreyas Iyer is left with

The three T20Is are at the Arun Jaitley Stadium in Delhi on 13, 15 and 17 September, all starting at 7pm. They are technically Afghanistan’s home fixtures, staged in India as their home games have been for years, which gives the whole thing a slightly strange billing for a crowd that will be almost entirely behind the visiting side.

Shreyas Iyer is expected to lead. His start in the job was rough: a 34-run defeat at Stormont in Belfast on 26 June in his first match in charge, then a T20I series in England that the hosts won, their first series victory over India in the format. A 3-0 sweep in Zimbabwe in late July, built around three wins in four days at Harare, stopped the slide.

A short series before a multi-sport event is exactly the window a captain wants for settling a side. Iyer will get it without Pandya, probably without Bumrah, and with two more players easing back in. Whatever XI is read out in Delhi on 13 September, it is not the one India would pick if everyone were fit.

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