Laxman says there was no miscommunication, and the CoE has had no head of sports science for 18 months

India fly to Galle for a Test on Friday without Jasprit Bumrah, without Sai Sudharsan, and without Washington Sundar for the first match of the two. Bumrah was named in the squad and ruled out of it within days, which is the sort of sequence that makes people ask who exactly is talking to whom. VVS Laxman, who runs the BCCI’s Centre of Excellence in Bengaluru, spent the weekend answering that question. His answer was that the reporting lines are fine and the bodies are not.

The process, as Laxman describes it

“The selector chairperson reaches out to the CoE asking for the fitness status report,” he said. “And we collect the current status and send it to the selection committee chairperson, with a copy to the respective head coach and BCCI.” He went further than that, calling it “a brilliant coordination between the COE, the team management of both the teams, the SSM staff and the selection committees.”

The detail that gets lost in the outrage is the asterisk. When Bumrah and Sudharsan were named for Sri Lanka, both had one next to their name, meaning subject to fitness. They were not declared fit and then broken. They were given three more weeks to get there and did not. BCCI secretary Devajit Saikia made the same point in blunter language. “As VVS has rightly said, it is a human body. It is not a machine,” he said. “So he may take 14 days’ time or he may take 28 days’ time to recover.”

Not a rehab centre

Laxman’s sharper line was about what the CoE is for. “CoE is not a rehab centre,” he said, pointing to a mandate from the board that runs well past fixing injured internationals. Clearance is not a doctor’s nod either. A player has to hit prescribed benchmarks and complete a Return To Play programme covering strength and conditioning and skill work, then play two RTP matches before anyone signs him off.

Which is roughly why Bumrah did not make it. The left knee has been bothering him since the T20 World Cup, a tournament he played out in full before getting through nearly all of IPL 2026 on it, and he has since had an injection. Sudharsan is carrying a stress injury in his right big toe picked up in the second India A Test against Sri Lanka A last month. Sundar’s problem costs him Galle rather than the tour.

The job nobody will take

Here is the part that sits awkwardly beside “no miscommunication”. The CoE has had no permanent head of sports science and medicine since Nitin Patel resigned in March 2025. That is 18 months. Senior physiotherapist Dhananjay Kaushik has been covering it in the meantime.

It has not been for want of trying. Laxman named Andrew Leipus, with whom everything was agreed before “Andrew backed off citing family reasons”. A former head of sports science at the All Blacks got close too and pulled out late. The sticking point is geography and hours: living in Bengaluru is not negotiable, and as Laxman put it, “It is a full time job and it is not a part time one. It is day to day monitoring.”

I think both things are true at once, and that is the uncomfortable bit. The paperwork can move exactly as Laxman describes, chair to CoE to head coach to board, and the operation can still be a year and a half short of the person whose job is to own it. Clean reporting lines are not the same as somebody senior watching a knee every day and telling the selectors, early, that three weeks will not be enough.

Galle on Friday

Sarfaraz Khan comes in for Sudharsan, and Auqib Nabi, who took 104 Ranji wickets in two seasons, replaces Bumrah. The first Test starts at Galle on 15 August and the second in Colombo on 23 August. Shubman Gill, who was himself a fitness question after hurting a finger in training, made 44 in the warm-up match against a Sri Lanka Cricket XI, so at least one of these stories has stopped moving.

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