Pujara’s advice to Manav Suthar: play the IPL, just don’t bowl like it
Cheteshwar Pujara has asked India to preserve Manav Suthar for Test cricket after the 24-year-old’s ten-wicket haul in Galle. His concern is not the IPL itself, but the one thing a T20 season would ask him to give up.
Aug 21, 2026
Manav Suthar has played two Test matches in his life and taken 17 wickets in them at an average of 11.35. The second finished on Wednesday, 19 August, when his 10 for 131 beat Sri Lanka at Galle by 165 runs and put India 1-0 up. A day later, one of the more careful voices in Indian cricket was already worrying about what the game tends to do to bowlers like him.
What Pujara actually said
Cheteshwar Pujara, speaking to India Today, said India should be looking to preserve Suthar for the Test format. That sounds like standard workload caution. It is not. Pujara’s point was narrower, and better.
“I don’t mind him playing in the IPL,” he said. “If he plays in the IPL, if he’s successful in the IPL, that is fine, but don’t change your strength.”
Then he named the strength. “For someone like Manav Suthar, who is flighting the ball, who is willing to go a little slower, when it comes to red-ball cricket, you don’t need to change that. Don’t change yourself just for the IPL. Don’t change your natural ability, which is to flight the ball.”
Read that again and you notice what he is not saying. He has no objection to the tournament. His objection is to the adjustment the tournament asks a bowler to make.
Why flight is the whole point
A spinner who gives the ball air is making a trade. Slower through the air means more time in it, more drift, more dip, and a better chance that a batter who has committed to a length finds the ball has not arrived yet. It also means a batter who picks it early can hit it a long way. In a Test that trade is worth taking, because one false shot ends an innings. In a T20 it is a bad trade, because one false shot costs six and the bowler still has three overs to bowl.
The T20 answer is to push it flatter and quicker, closer to the stumps, and let the batter manufacture the pace. Nothing about that is illegitimate; it is simply what the format rewards. What Pujara is pointing at is that the adjustment is not always reversible. The bowler who comes back to red-ball cricket can be a quicker, flatter version of the one who left, and less dangerous for it.
The bowling that started the conversation
Galle supplied the evidence. Suthar followed a first-innings 4 for 76 with 6 for 55, and his match figures of 10 for 131 are now the best by an India bowler in a Test in Sri Lanka. He went past Harbhajan Singh, who took 10 for 153 at the same ground in 2008, and Ravichandran Ashwin, whose 10 for 160 came there in 2015. Only those two had managed a ten-wicket match for India in the country before him.
It was not a one-off either. On debut against Afghanistan in New Chandigarh on 6 June 2026 he took 6 for 33 in the first innings and seven in the match. Two Tests, two five-wicket hauls, and he has done it while bowling slower than the situation strictly demanded, including with a new ball, which is not a common instinct at 24.
He is from Sri Ganganagar in Rajasthan and has been taking wickets in bulk for years. He claimed 44 in his first eight first-class matches after debuting in February 2022, and the following Ranji Trophy season he took 39 in six games, more than anyone else in the Rajasthan side.
He is already on an IPL roster
The scenario Pujara describes is not hypothetical. Gujarat Titans signed Suthar at his base price in 2024 and re-signed him for ₹30 lakh ahead of the 2026 season. In that time he has played five matches, bowled in four of them, and taken two wickets at an economy rate of 11.75.
That is close to the worst version of the situation. A spinner who plays a full IPL season gets something concrete out of the trade. A spinner who watches most of it, then bowls two overs in a tight game and gets hit, learns only that his natural method is a liability. The lesson is wrong and it is expensive.
There is no mechanism to fix this, either. Nobody can tell a 24-year-old to turn down a franchise contract, and nobody should have to. What Pujara is asking for is smaller and more realistic: that Suthar keeps bowling the way he bowls, whatever colour the ball is.
Colombo comes first
The nearer test is not the auction. India play the second and final Test against Sri Lanka at the Sinhalese Sports Club in Colombo from 23 to 27 August, and with a 1-0 lead they need only a draw to take the series. Suthar walks into it as the bowler who won the first one.
Sri Lanka have now seen what he does, which is the part nobody mentions when a spinner has a big first series. The second look is always harder than the first. If he is still tossing it up at the SSC after they have had four days to plan for him, Pujara’s worry may end up being the least of India’s questions about him.