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After the Champions Trophy and the subsequent tour of the West Indies in 2017, it was quite clear that the Indian team management was looking at different bowling attacks for different formats - it helped that they had the alternatives, in the pace and spin departments. And Bhuvneshwar Kumar, India's top bowler in that Champions Trophy in terms of wickets and economy rate, was a big part of those plans, especially in limited-overs cricket, where he and Jasprit Bumrah were the preferred top two. Injuries, however, often forced him to miss Tests. Sometimes, he missed out because of conditions - Bhuvneshwar has always been at his best when it swings - too. That was until he travelled with India to South Africa for the Test series Live Cricket Score Ball By Ball. He played the first Test, in Cape Town, and picked up six wickets. But India lost. He was left out of the second game, which also India lost, but returned for the third, in Johannesburg. And on a treacherous surface, returned 3 for 44 and 1 for 39, looking unplayable at times - so much that he often missed the edges. He also scored 30 and 33 to take home the match award as India won by 63 runs. But 18 months on, his number of Test appearances remains stuck at 21. That Johannesburg game his last. His name doesn't even figure in India's squad for the upcoming Tests at home against South Africa. Not even once Bumrah was ruled out with injury, with Umesh Yadav getting the nod.<br><br>
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Live Cricket Score Ball By Ball After the Champions Trophy and the subsequent tour of the West Indies in 2017, it was quite clear that the Indian team management was looking at different bowling attacks for different formats - it helped that they had the alternatives, in the pace and spin departments. And Bhuvneshwar Kumar, India's top bowler in that Champions Trophy in terms of wickets and economy rate, was a big part of those plans, especially in limited-overs cricket, where he and Jasprit Bumrah were the preferred top two. Injuries, however, often forced him to miss Tests. Sometimes, he missed out because of conditions - Bhuvneshwar has always been at his best when it swings - too. That was until he travelled with India to South Africa for the Test
series Live Cricket Score Ball By Ball. He played the first Test, in Cape Town, and picked up six wickets. But India lost. He was left out of the second game, which also India lost, but returned for the third, in Johannesburg. And on a treacherous surface, returned 3 for 44 and 1 for 39, looking unplayable at times - so much that he often missed the edges. He also scored 30 and 33 to take home the match award as India won by 63 runs. But 18 months on, his number of Test appearances remains stuck at 21. That Johannesburg game his last. His name doesn't even figure in India's squad for the upcoming Tests at home against South Africa. Not even once Bumrah was ruled out with injury, with Umesh Yadav getting the nod.
That all-around effort in Johannesburg had given India victory on an extremely tough pitch to end the series on a high. With seven wickets in the three subsequent T20Is, Bhuvneshwar was on a high, among the Indian bowlers to watch out for when the team travelled to England later in the year. The T20Is and ODIs preceded the Tests in England, and Bhuvneshwar's tour ended right there. While playing the third ODI in Leeds, he aggravated an old lower-back injury, an issue that had been troubling him since the IPL earlier in the year. Even before the IPL, Bhuvneshwar sat out of the Nidahas Trophy and later the one-off Test against Afghanistan at home to manage the injury. As a result, he flew back to India while the England Test series was on to undergo intense rehabilitation at the National Cricket Academy in Bengaluru and was out of action for two months before returning for the Asia Cup Live Cricket Score Ball By Ball.
A return to England brought with it another niggle for Bhuvneshwar. While playing the high-profile match against Pakistan, he bowled only 2.4 overs before leaving the field with a hamstring injury to be ruled out of the next few games of the tournament. India captain Virat Kohli had said that Bhuvneshwar was "going to be a significant factor for us" and the swing bowler lived up to the reputation with three wickets in the semi-final against New Zealand. But the batsmen's failure meant India's tournament ended there Live Cricket Score Ball By Ball. Bhuvneshwar toured the Caribbean recently for the ODIs and T20Is, after being left out of the Tests, and he picked a four-for in the second ODI, along with three T20I wickets in as many matches with a frugal economy rate of five runs per over from nine overs. If we plot these averages on a graph, most of India's captains occupy a tight cluster of impressive batting averages and middling bowling averages. Kohli sits apart from them, in the company of some of history's most successful Test captains.
Live Cricket Score Ball By Ball As has been the case with him recently, almost every time he recovers and gets back into rhythm, Bhuvneshwar picks up a new niggle. ESPNcricinfo understands that Bhuvneshwar was unavailable for selection for the recent T20I series against South Africa and the Tests that will commence on October 2, though there has been no official announcement to that effect. In the context of the era they have played in, where pitches have tended to challenge batsmen considerably, the batting numbers of Kohli's team shouldn't be underestimated. In terms of the difference between batting and bowling averages, only one side, Waugh's Australia, has done better than Kohli's India, among the 50 groups that have been led by one captain at least 30 times.
