Bowling for long hours is an incredibly demanding and challenging task. Such an effort tests the physical as well as mental ability of a bowler and one player who knows it really well is Ishant Sharma.
Although the veteran pacer is not a part of the Indian team anymore, he has been playing at the highest level of the game for more than 15 years now. The right-arm pacer was a workhorse for Team India for well over a decade and is well aware of the toll that it takes on the body.
In Tests only, he has bowled almost 20,000 deliveries in addition to bowling thousands of deliveries in other formats and in domestic circuit. The constant pounding on the joints, muscles, and ligaments made Ishant Sharma suffer several serious injurious in the past. Injuries were one of the reasons why he did not play in the shorter formats for long and focused only on Tests.
Ishant Sharma on his struggle:
Ishant Sharma has opened up on his painful journey as a bowler. Speaking in a podcast, Ishant revealed an anecdote where he decided to take injection and bowl. It was MS Dhoni’s last Test and Ishant decided to risk his knee. The injury eventually made him miss the 2015 World Cup.
“My pain threshold is very high. I missed the 2015 World Cup because of this. We were playing a Test series (in Australia). It was Mahi bhai’s (MS Dhoni’s) last Test match and I suddenly had pain in my knee,” Ishant told social media influencer Ranveer Allahbadia on the latter’s Youtube channel.
“(Mohammed) Shami and Umesh (Yadav) were bowling and (Ravichandran) Ashwin was the third (bowler). I saw that they were also tired and thought, ‘How long will they bowl?’ So I told my physio, ‘Please call a doctor and get me an injection.,'” he said.
“I was taking an injection every session. We bowled five sessions and I took six injections. Because I could not see that my team was losing because of me. It ultimately proved to be harmful. Duncan Fletcher was our coach at that time. He used to say, ‘Don’t take the injections, the World Cup is coming up.’ But I told him the same thing, ‘I feel like I am cheating the team (if I am not bowling)’,” he added.
Ishant is not a part of the Indian Test team anymore. His last Test appearance came in November 2021. Although he impressed one and all with his performance in IPL 2023, he is unlikely to be recalled again.