The National Cricket Academy (NCA) at Bengaluru has again come under scanner after the pacer Shardul Thakur suffered a groin injury in his debutant Test match.
The 26-year-old right-arm pacer Shardul Thakur suffered a groin injury on the opening day of his ongoing debutant Test match against Windies at Hyderabad (Deccan). He delivered only 10 balls before getting hurt in that injury and returned to the dressing room. After that, he didn’t return to the field till the day two of the Test match.
Thakur suffered the groin injury during the Asia Cup 2018 in UAE that was played in last month. After their opening game of the tournament against Hong Kong in Group A, Thakur suffered the groin injury and later, he was ruled out from the entire tournament.
At the end of the last month, Thakur returned to cricket as he represented for Mumbai in the 2018/19 Vijay Hazare Trophy. But now, it seems like he was not fully fit and that’s why the question has been raised on NCA who produced the fit certificate.
A BCCI official told PTI, “Groin injury is a fitness related injury and not an on-field one. My question is how did Shardul get a fitness certificate within 10 days of complaining groin soreness and then it recurs within another fortnight. Strange.”
It is not the first time when NCA activities have come under the scanner. Earlier in recent times, their activities came under the scanner after the pacers Bhuvneshwar Kumar, Jasprit Bumrah and the Test wicketkeeper Wriddhiman Saha failed to recover in time from their fitness issues.
Talking about the responsibilities on this matter, the BCCI official said, “COO Tufan Ghosh and Ashish Kaushik, who looks after the rehab of these contracted India players should answer. What sort of a clearance did he get? We hear big things about workload management but a bowler short throws other bowlers workload into a tizzy. If I am not wrong, one of the senior office bearers (Treasurer Anirudh Chaudhry) wrote about NCA’s functioning to the CoA but there wasn’t any reply. So this NCA mess lands at CoA’s doorstep.”
