The former New Zealand fast bowler, and current Rajasthan Royals bowling coach, talks about playing with and after injury
Interview by Nagraj Gollapudi30-Mar-2025Ace former fast bowler Shane Bond, who has worked with Jasprit Bumrah at Mumbai Indians in the IPL, and who was no stranger to injury himself during a stop-start career for New Zealand, spoke to us during the Champions Trophy about Bumrah’s troubles with his back, and the challenges of managing bowling workloads effectively.Can you break down the biomechanics of Bumrah’s action and why it is unique?
His run-up’s an interesting one, isn’t it, because he sort of [starts in] fits and starts, but the last five metres, he accelerates through the crease, gains momentum. Obviously, he’s got those levers [long arms]. He has a very short delivery stride, so he gets his front foot down quickly, which means he has to then, all of a sudden, catch up with his arms. So he generates velocity through his arm speed, [and has] got a very strong locked front knee to increase that pace. And then he has an exceptional wrist on the back of it.It’s just one of those ones where the timing of when he releases everything is almost perfect. I look at someone like Hardik Pandya, who’s not a very big guy but he hits the ball enormously hard and a very long way because of the same thing: his kinetic chain, where he just releases all his energy – just the timing’s perfect and he smacks it, and that’s what Boom has.Related
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Does the braced front knee, which bears all the weight, mean his back carries a lot of stress?
Yeah, I suppose. I can think of guys who I played with in New Zealand, [Jacob] Oram, [Kyle] Mills, [Chris] Cairns. They had [front] knees that just collapsed a little bit. And not that they didn’t have back injuries, but patellar tendons [the ligaments that connect the knee cap to the shin bone] were also a cause of concern because the load went through the knee.The force will go up the chain: through the calf, the hamstring, the glutes and the back. And so if you are not strong in those areas, the force will end up in the back at some point. So if you think of any top bowler, at some point in time when you have been bowling for a long time, your hamstrings, your calves, are going to fatigue and that force will get taken somewhere.
“If you go to the gym and want to do ten sets of ten and do that day after day after day after day without resting, you will probably break something. And it’s very similar in bowling”
So when you look at strength and conditioning, what you are trying to do is build the strength through the calf, through the hamstring, through the glutes, the core, so that the abs bear a lot of the force, and the sides. Being able to do that and sustain that for a period of time to take the pressure off the back.Everybody is different in terms of how much they can handle. So a big thing for me when I became a coach was working out how much a certain bowler could take. So I could look at a Tim Southee and a Trent Boult, they could comfortably operate at around 40 to 45 overs in a match, and Neil Wagner could probably handle 60, and Adam Milne was probably 30, so when he started to have back-to-back days, there were issues. That’s what you are trying to work out: what is the real risk area and where is the sort of sweet spot where they can sustain and stay on the park. The longer you play and you build that tolerance, the better it is.You look at the Australian bowlers, they have done a pretty good job. They walked out of that series [against India in Australia], they are all fit, but they still had injuries in other areas. They are all dealing now with niggles, they were out of the Champions Trophy. So they just had other stuff because of the sheer volume of overs they bowled. The top bowlers you talk to, particularly as you get older, they will talk about how they don’t want to stop bowling. They might take a week or two off to refresh and let some of those niggles settle, but they don’t want to take three or four months off because coming back, they have got to rebuild and that’s a big risk period again. They like to keep ticking over all year round.What is a stress fracture and why is it debilitating?
If you go to the gym and you lift weights, you sort of stretch the muscles and then they often say you take a day’s rest and the muscles repair and they grow and they expand, and that’s how you build big muscles. It’s a little bit like that with the bone. So every time you bowl, you cause a little bit of damage in the bone, it breaks up a little bit, and if you give it a rest, it’ll harden. And if you do that over a period of time, that bone in your back will firm up and become quite strong. So the more load you can put through it, especially if it’s gradual, you will actually build strength over a period of time. Now that’s called chronic load.Bond says not ramping up slowly to larger bowling loads – like going from bowling in T20s directly to a long Test series – increases the risk of back injuries•Mumbai IndiansWhen that bone’s breaking down, if you just put too much load on it, bang, bang, bang, it can break [develop tiny cracks], you can go all the way through the bone, or if you bowl day after day after day when that bone’s sort of breaking down and you hammer it, it can break. If you go to the gym and want to do ten sets of ten and do that day after day after day after day without resting, you will probably break something. And it’s very similar in bowling.There’s a lot of research around where the sweet spot is with bowling loads, but the bottom line is, if you look at all the techniques around the world, they are all very different. But you are dealing with super-professional athletes – the Boultys [Trent Boult], the Bumrahs, the Mitchell Johnsons, the Pat Cumminses, the Mitchell Starcs – all their actions are unique, but there seems to be a couple of things that stand out. If you bowl too much for too long… and I have to look at like a Booms – first time he had a stress fracture [2019], he came out of IPL and played Test cricket. So you are bowling 20 overs a week and all of a sudden you bowl 50 overs a week – stress fracture. Trent Boult was the same.So if you go too hard too early or with not enough load behind you, you are likely to break. And generally the top bowlers break when they either come back too quick and the [injury] recurs or they have been playing for a while and then that load just goes ba-boom! And that’s the real challenge [for] coaches when you are transitioning between T20, especially tournaments like the IPL, and then you go to the World Test Championship a month later, where you could be expected to bowl 50 overs, and then you walk into a Test series – danger! And it’s really hard with the scheduling to look after that because you just can’t get that volume of work in the IPL. It’s too hot, the travel schedule’s too busy to be able to bowl probably as much as you want to [to prepare for the Test series].There were times where I was really sore for a number of days, but generally what will happen is, if you have some pain, it will settle down quite quickly, and within two or three days you could feel completely normal. Except, as soon as you bowl a cricket ball, bang, that pain is instantaneous, it’ll come back and it will really hurt. So what Rowan [Dr Rowan Schouten, a Christchurch-based orthopaedic spine surgeon, who has operated on Jofra Archer and others] said to me is: a stress fracture or fracture in the vertebrae of your back is like having a broken arm. Imagine you have got a fractured arm. They put a cast on it to keep it steady, to protect it. You don’t do that with your back. So generally, when you get that stress fracture, you will have [to have] six weeks of doing absolutely nothing.
“Generally, if you have some pain, it will settle down, and within two or three days you could feel completely normal. Except, as soon as you bowl a cricket ball, bang, it’ll come back and it will really hurt”
So no running, just trying to stay as steady as you possibly can to let that heal. In the case of Bumrah, he’s now had that six-weeks period, maybe a little bit more, of rest, but of course then he has to build all that bowling load back up. We call it Level 1, 2, 3 -half a run-up, three quarters of a run-up, full run-up. Working through the intensities, getting up to that top intensity and then building some volume through that top intensity. In an ideal world that’ll take, I don’t know, six to ten weeks, which, obviously when you have got a busy playing schedule it’s very easy to want to rush a player back into the next tour, and that’s the danger. If you go too much too soon, you can have a recurrence of that injury.In Bumrah’s case, as we understand it, it is likely that it was more akin to a stress reaction?
When you get on a scan, it’s called bone edema [a build-up of fluid in the bone marrow]. That gets to a point where it is starting to get painful. And the next step after that is it actually fractures. So the pain’s kicking in and the bone’s on the borderline of cracking. For a stress fracture, you are sort of looking at [minimum] four months before you come back and start bowling. For a stress reaction, they will say six weeks and then you’d be wanting to re-scan, but conservatively eight, maybe. And that’s what that looks like with Booms. I’m sure they’ve re-scanned, that [stress] reaction probably cleared up, there’s no crack anymore, and then they can get on with it.What does surgery for a stress-related back injury involve? Bumrah has had one already, two years ago.
What happens is, they chisel into it and they stimulate the blood growth in the bone and they take some chips off your hip [bone] and they pack it all together with some wire to make it stronger to stimulate growth with a sort of binding around it. With all going well, it will completely re-heal and it should be stronger because you have got some bolts and screws holding all that in place.Kyle [Jamieson] and Jasprit now, I think, are the only couple [of fast bowlers] who have had a re-injury [stress-related]. Matt Henry had the surgery at 21 and he’s been going over ten years. I had another sort of six years when I played post-surgery. Kyle’s was the same. He came out of a T20 programme, went into a Test match, bowled [about] 40 overs, lots of bouncers, re-injured. Booms played five Test matches and bowled a heap of overs [in the Australia series], and the sheer volume just got them in the end.Kyle Jamieson had surgery for a stress fracture of the back in 2023, but suffered yet another one in 2024 that kept him out of the game for a year•Getty ImagesWhen I had my surgery, mate, I couldn’t bend for about four days, so I was completely straight. You imagine trying to go to the toilet when you are completely straight. Every day I just got a little bit more movement back. After six weeks I sort of got my training gear on and I went for a walk. When I saw Cameron Green – he is the last one who’s had back surgery, he had it just before Christmas [2024], and within two days he was up and around walking for 20 minutes. Like, sitting up normally.And by day four he had walked for about 40 minutes. He said it was too much, he got a bit sore, but you are progressing a lot more quickly now. Because I was the first guy to have the procedure done in terms of cricket, I was a little bit envious when I saw Cameron [be mobile so quickly].It is the first time Bumrah has been forced to sit out since his back surgery in 2023, when he was 29. You had back surgery when you were at a similar age and went on to play for a number of years. What is the challenge the first time the injury recurs or you feel discomfort in the same area?
Psychologically, it’s a challenge. I still had times when I played with my back really locked up, my muscles down my back would spasm. I called it a concrete back – I couldn’t move. So I played a couple of Test matches where I felt like I had no movement through my back and it was really sore, but I knew it wasn’t broken. So I had to be careful and I had glucose injections in my back and a long massage to make sure that I was loose.For me it was, yep, I know it’s been fixed, I know I’m okay, but it still doesn’t take away the lingering doubt. Every day I bowled was like, is today the day where it’s going to go pop? And I’m sure Kyle and Jasprit will be the same.I always tell my players, take a week at the front end and that could save you six months at the back end. Spend a little bit longer in your preparation and your build-up because it will give you a better chance to stay on the field. Obviously from a Rajasthan [Royals] standpoint, I don’t really want to see him [Bumrah] (), but I do want to see him back on the field. I do hope they take it conservatively to give him the best chance to come back and come back for the next however long he wants to play.Despite numerous injuries, and after back surgery, and various niggles in other parts of the body, you did not hold back. You told us in 2010, soon after you retired, that you saw the value you brought to New Zealand was that of an “Olympic” bowler. Do you have any advice to Bumrah in that regard?
That’s why I really enjoyed listening to Dale [Steyn, who the recently interviewed, alongside Bond]. What made Dale one of the all-time greats is his ability to lift the gears up – he could operate here () and then all of a sudden, lift his game to a different level (). Booms does that pretty well. In Australia it was just the sheer volume of overs that got him in the end – in those five Test matches his performance was ridiculous, and they leaned on him a lot and I think he might’ve bowled 50 overs in a Test match.
“You are not going to avoid an injury, you are just trying to avoid the really bad ones, and I’m hoping Bumrah can avoid another one of these”
And I suppose the lesson is, you can’t have him bowl that many overs again in a Test match. Forty-five might be the top, and we can’t risk it because he’s too valuable. And I’m sure they have got all those things considered around the bowling loads and they would have reflected on why he’s had that injury. He’s a professional, Boomsy, he does everything right. All you are trying to do is prevent that… you are not going to avoid an injury, you are just trying to avoid the really bad ones, and I’m hoping he can avoid another one of these.India play five Tests in England back to back in a matter of one and a half months later this year. While it’s for the bowler himself to take the call, what would be your advice?
See I would always go, no it’s not [the bowler’s call]. Because my experience with any player is, they will tell you that they are okay and that’s always the risk. If you give any player the option, it’s like, nah, I’m good to go. And I have seen players who want to play and they are injured and they will tell you they want to play and actually they have played probably sub-par, they are not really ready. That’s the coach’s role, to say, look, this is the plan for you. And it’s easy to have that plan when you are winning. When you are losing, it becomes, oh, are we going to throw that [away]?While he can’t remodel his action, would you ask someone like Bumrah to change something about his bowling?
I don’t think so. He had the [2023] surgery, but he played all that [Australia] Test series, performed unbelievably. At the end of the day, he just bowled too much over a one-month period. And it hasn’t cracked, he hasn’t got a fracture, he is on the borderline of a fracture. But what India would have learned is, if you then look at a five-Test match series in England and they do the same thing, they are probably going to get the same result. So you can’t do that. You need a squad of bowlers where you can sort of pick and choose.Because if you lose him, you have got T20 World Cups, you’ve got 50-overs World Cups and he’s an important member across all formats, IPL, all that sort of stuff.