Over the years, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) has majorly focused on injuries of A-list players or the under-19 squad. However, the cricket body plans on focusing more towards injuries and workload management for domestic players as well.
Things started to change when the research team of BCCI started gathering injury-related data and information of domestic players across the country.
Image Courtesy: The Hindu
An initiative taken by the National Cricket Academy (NCA), the major category to be benefited from this decision would be the fast bowlers.
The NCA recently held a web conference of all leading physiotherapists across the country, in which they discussed match data collected by the healing experts for the last Ranji Trophy season. There was a detailed discussion on the new ‘Return To Play’ (RTP) policy.
“The main motto of this initiative is injury surveillance. Players will have more faith and confidence in our domestic physios. It’s a process which will surely give us result in future,” a senior state-team physiotherapist who attended the webinar told TOI.
This intricately collected data will help state team managements to take a call on how many matches a fast bowler is fit to play at the optimum level.
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Another physiotherapist who attended the BCCI web conference said, “The states will also have to think about having proper bench strength in the fast-bowling department to preserve talented pacers. If it is mismanaged, we might lose a good talent. By the time a fast bowler reaches the highest level, he should have optimum fitness levels. The data will also help in judging injury patterns.”
The groundwork of this initiative started last year when physiotherapists of each state association in every category – Under 16 to senior, were asked to share the RTP data.
“The data will be useful for RTP testing. It will help in determining when a player should be back in action after injury. Physios follow different methods regarding this, because of which the chances of injury recurrence increase,” he further added.
Till now, injury-related research in cricket was mostly from Australia and England. NCA collected data of both fit and injured players. Now, the NCA has a beeline data on the players.
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“With baseline data, NCA will have common mechanisms and certain standards which will decide when a player returns to action. It will bring in uniformity. NCA decided to have a ‘gold standard’ method, which has some specified criteria where players need to achieve certain levels. He needs to pass a certain test,” the physio stated.
There were debates about tele-medicines, especially during the current lockdown phase due to Covid-19 pandemic outburst.
“If a physio is finding it difficult to assess or diagnose any player, he can take guidance of NPA through teleconferencing by taking an appointment,” he said.
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