The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) has announced plans to push for a more player-friendly Future Tours Programme (FTP) and tighten return-to-play protocols, as mounting injuries to top cricketers threaten squad depth ahead of a packed international calendar. BCCI Secretary Devajit Saikia made the announcement on Thursday, 3 September, following a high-level review meeting at the BCCI headquarters in Mumbai.

The Injury Crisis Driving the Review

The scale of the problem has been hard to ignore. Hardik Pandya, Jasprit Bumrah, Nitish Kumar Reddy, Washington Sundar, and B. Sai Sudharsan have all missed recent tours despite initial conditional selections. The latest 15-man T20I squad against Afghanistan again lists Bumrah, Sundar, Reddy, and Harshit Rana as 'subject to fitness' — a qualifier that has drawn fresh scrutiny to the Centre of Excellence (CoE) in Bengaluru.

Saikia attributed the surge in injuries directly to workload. 'Individual players are having injuries because they have to play a lot of matches. If you look at their schedule, in England, we had a 15-player team go for the ODIs, and out of that, three or four players got injured during the match. We have to think that they had played two months of IPL before that,' he told reporters.

What the Review Meeting Covered

The meeting was attended by Test and ODI captain Shubman Gill, T20I skipper Shreyas Iyer, and head coach Gautam Gambhir. Existing return-to-play guidelines were evaluated to ensure players clear defined fitness benchmarks before resuming international duty.

Saikia stressed the discussions were systemic, not player-specific. 'There was no discussion on any individual player. Today's discussion was totally general in nature — what policies and protocols we have to maintain regarding maintaining the fitness level of every player,' he said. The board also took feedback from the captains and head coach to 'chalk up a proper strategy to avoid all these kinds of unwanted situations.'

FTP Scheduling Changes on the Agenda

Saikia confirmed that BCCI officials will raise the scheduling burden at upcoming international forums. 'We have instructed our FTP personnel, who will be meeting very soon in various international forums, that our FTP should be scheduled in such a way that there is proper rest for the players as well as some kind of acclimatisation through friendly matches before any major series in SENA countries,' he said.

This comes amid a broader global conversation about player welfare, with franchise leagues — including the Indian Premier League (IPL) — compressing recovery windows between high-intensity stints.

The Sports Science Vacancy at CoE

The Centre of Excellence currently operates without a permanent Head of Sports Science — a vacancy Saikia acknowledged but downplayed. He said 16 specialists are in place to manage fitness, rehabilitation, and prehabilitation, and that operations are running normally.

'That post is required, but that is a very high-level post for which the properly qualified person should be positioned. That kind of person is very short in number in India as well as in the whole world,' Saikia said, adding that a fresh global search will be launched at the earliest.

BCCI Dismisses Coordination Concerns

Saikia also pushed back against suggestions of friction between the national team management and CoE staff. 'We don't see that kind of situation in us — there is no such situation that there is a communication breakdown or there is no integrity among the CoE or the Team India staff,' he said. He described the board as 'a well-oiled engine' with full coordination across men's and women's team committees, coaching staff, and the high-performance centre.

The BCCI is expected to continue deliberations on injury management in subsequent meetings, with concrete FTP-level changes likely to be tabled once international scheduling talks begin.