• Source:JND
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Ex-New Zealand pacer Shane Bond, who has worked closely with Jasprit Bumrah when he was the bowling coach of Mumbai Indians, has warned the BCCI to manage Bumrah's workload smartly. Bond, whose career too was affected by lots of back injuries, reckoned that if Bumrah sustains another back injury at the same place for which he had to undergo surgery way back in 2023, could then end his career.

India's star pacer Jasprit Bumrah sustained the injury on the second day of the fifth and the last Test match of the Border-Gavaskar Trophy series in January and has stayed out of competitive cricket since then. Initially, he was part of India's ICC Champions Trophy 2025 team but was then replaced by Harshit Rana owing to a back injury. He is currently undergoing rehab at the NCA and there is no official update yet as to when he will make a comeback to competitive cricket.

“When he went off for scans, it was at Sydney; there was some messaging coming up around that he had sprains and stuff like that," Bond told ESPN Cricinfo. “I worried that it wasn’t going to be a sprain; it might be a bony injury around that area (the back). I thought he might struggle to make the Champions Trophy if it was. I think Booms (Bumrah) will be fine, but it’s just that (workload) management (matters). Looking at the tours and the schedule going forward, where are the opportunities to give him a break, but really, where are the danger periods? And often it is that the (transition from) IPL to the Test Championship will be a risk," he said.

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As per Bond, he doesn't want Bumrah to play more than two Test matches as overlooking his workload management will result in him getting injured once again and that might end his career.

“He’s too valuable for the next World Cup and stuff. So, you’d be looking at five Tests in England; I wouldn’t want to be playing him in any more than two in a row. Coming out of the back end of the IPL into a Test match is going to be a huge risk. And so how they manage that is going to be key. They may say, Look, it’s four Test matches in total. Or three. If we can get him through the English summer and he’s fit, we can probably then go with some confidence that we can carry him across the rest of the formats. So that’s hard because he is your best bowler, but if he has another injury in the same spot, that could be a career-ender, potentially, because I’m not sure you can have surgery on that spot again," he concluded.